Hendrickson Adventures

This year I made a promise to myself. Be on the Battenkill from the beginning of the Hendrickson hatch until the end. Not every single day, as real life does have a tendency to get in the way of grand plans, but certainly to find myself on the river as often as possible. With the Hendrickson's now a pleasant memory, I can happily say that I succeeded in my goal. It was an adventure worth chronicling.

For me, Hendrickson season began weeks before the hatch. In March I decided it would be a bit of fun to do a little kick sampling of the river substrate to see exactly what was lurking about. Would I find any Hendrickson nymphs at all? What else might be there. Would it ultimately prove predictive for the season to come?

My immediate reaction to what I discovered was that yes indeed there were plenty of Hendrickson type nymphs in the river. Surprisingly, though, I was mightily impressed with the amount of yellow stonefly nymphs in a number of different sizes (not photographed for this post). Besides Hendrickson nymphs, there were a few other mayflies represented as well as a caddis or two, a cranefly larva and a dragonfly nymph. A pretty nice mix of creepy crawlies for a short and simple sampling.

An early season kick sample of a riffle on the NY side of the river turned up a nice mix of insects, with the Hendrickson nymphs being the most prominent of the bunch.

One of my biggest worries going into the spring was the impact of anchor ice that had built up during the coldest days of a frigid February. Anchor ice does no favors for bug life, and my fear was that as the ice let go of the bottom it would take with it any number of macroinvertebrates. While there was certainly a likelihood of this having happened, it would appear that the river weathered the winter well enough.

With the bug investigation out of the way there was little to do but wait. For me, waiting isn't an entirely passive activity. As winter loses its grip I begin to look for signs of the advancing seasons. Over the years I have come to look forward to the very earliest signs of spring in backyard wetlands, marshes along rivers, and in the gardens in and around my neighborhood in the flatlands of Massachusetts. As I begin to open camp in early April, I compare what I am seeing 150 miles to the east and south to what is happening in and about the Battenkill valley. All of this is done with one eye towards the river and an anxiousness for the first of the Hendricksons.

Among the initial cues of an approaching spring are the first plaintive calls of the spring peepers that bring voice to the season. The first mild days of March seem to kick off the festivities. I often go for a drive on these mildish evenings to a particular wetland that seems to wake up a day or two before other surrounding frog waters.

Right around the same time that I begin to hear peepers, perhaps even a few days earlier, I will begin to hear and see red-winged blackbirds in the marshlands along Assabet river a half mile down the road from home. Along a little tributary of the Assabet it's also possible to see black stoneflies taking flight on calm afternoons. While these are clear signs of our spring to come, they do not directly herald the beginning of our Hendricksons. I enjoy them, make note of when these "events" start so I can compare to past years and groan when a late March or early April snowfall is mentioned by a far too cheerful weather person.

My wife will often comment that these late season storms do no favors for those training to run the Boston Marathon. I think she does this to remind me that she has run half a dozen of these herself while I have been little more than a chauffeur, dropping her off in Hopkinton and picking her up in Boston. Never mind that finding a parking spot in the city on Patriots Day so I can find my wife among the 30,000 other runners presents its own unique challenges. During the years that Deanna didn't run the marathon Patriots Day meant one thing: fishing.

What REALLY gets me to sit up and pay attention is when I see the first blooms of forsythia. If they begin to flower before the end of March, I get nervous. Is this the sign of a premature hatch? For years I fished a central Massachusetts river that gets a heavy Hendrickson hatch. It was a near certainty that once the forsythia was blooming in my neighborhood there would be Hendricksons popping 50 miles to the west of me. A sick day from work was an equal certainty.

The first blooms of forsythia are a good signal to begin to pay attention to the weather forecasts. Hendrickson's won't necessarily hatch when forsythia begin to bloom, but the hatch isn't far off. Apologies for the picture quality.

This year the forsythia began to bloom between the 6th and 8th of April. Was this predictive of an early hatch or coincidental? What do the hatch charts of old have to say about any of this? Do they even matter any longer?

We will get into all that in part two of Hendrickson Spring, along with some fishing.