I’ve enjoyed reading all of you guys banter going back and forth about wading and crossing Penns.
And for the record, I’m not the guy that some of you may have seen at the mouth of Big Poe last year near the end of April. He waded out to the middle of the Penns there and then waded right down the middle of the stream all the way through Love’s riffle, and maybe another hundred yards farther downstream before he got out. No wading staff, and he never fell in. The guy must have been an Olympic gymnast to have stayed upright through that water. I even watched him land a couple trout too.
Kinda reminded me of this dude that I saw a couple years ago who was fishing in this river.
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For perspective (I know my phone camera doesn’t show it), this river flow Is several times more than Penns creek is, on average, and is probably 150 feet wide where I took this picture.
When I first saw this fisherman, the guy was wading right across the fast riffle at the head head of this long pool, about 100’ or so upstream - a place that’s so fast that most fisherman never wade out farther than 10 feet from shore.
Next, the dude waded right down the middle of the river (which is over the top of my waders, and don’t ask how I know that) until the guy ended up here, where I took this picture.
I regularly fish this place, and rarely go farther than a few feet beyond the large flat rock that you can see just under the water behind the fisherman. The water there is nearly to the top of my waders, and with my longest cast I can just reach the opposite shoreline In front of this fisherman.
I watched this fisherman fish there for well over an hour, and finally tired of watching so I went back to my truck and took a nap. Awhile later, I woke to a knock on my truck window. It was this dude who apologized for taking up most of the prime water while fishing there for much of the afternoon.
I said that no apology was needed, and that I wasn’t in any hurry to begin fishing. I probably had already started fishing that day at sunrise, and planned to fish until near dark that evening, as I had done for several weeks straight up to then.
The most surprising ending to this encounter was that this fisherman dude was not a guy, as I had thought all the time while watching, but was actually a middle aged woman. 😮 I never saw her catch a single fish that day. Nor did I tell her that the exact place she was standing probably held well over 100 large trout before she waded into the middle of the pool. 😊
And I’m sure you guys already know that some of the places mentioned where you cross Penns can also hold its best fish.
. Yes, rising fish on Penns can surely make you do things in a quick pinch. They can make you call off work, forget the yard and say no to your wife and the family plans that were made. Perhaps no other stream in the state has that much power like Penns.
