Connecticut

Connecticut punches above its size, and the West Branch of the Farmington is the reason. It's a bottom-release tailwater below Goodwin Dam at Riverton that stays cold and fishable straight through summer while the rain-fed streams around it run warm and thin — one of the best trout rivers in the Northeast. The reach through New Hartford and Riverton is a permanent Trout Management Area with wild and holdover browns, hatches that run from Hendricksons and caddis in spring into summer sulphurs and tricos, and enough technical pocket water to have made it a Euro-nymphing proving ground. Flows are set by releases from the Metropolitan District Commission's dam and the Army Corps' Colebrook River Lake upstream, so on the Farmington the gauge tells you as much as the sky.

The Housatonic in the northwest hills is the other destination — a big, wide, boulder-strewn river through Cornwall and Falls Village with a catch-and-release TMA and a genuine Western feel to it. The honest catch is temperature: it's a freestone that warms into the 70s by midsummer, so the trout fishing is a spring-and-fall game (smallmouth take over in the heat, and DEEP posts thermal-refuge advisories when the water gets warm). East of the Connecticut River, the Salmon River at East Hampton — formed where the Jeremy and Blackledge come together — is a popular stocked fly-fishing-only TMA with a strong early-season and winter fishery. Connecticut DEEP sets the statewide trout regulations and the Trout Management Area and Wild Trout Management Area rules that govern each of these waters.