New York

New York is where American fly fishing was invented, and the Catskills are the reason. Within a couple of hours of the city, the Beaverkill and the Willowemoc meet at Junction Pool in Roscoe — the water Theodore Gordon fished when he tied the first American dry flies — and the whole culture of matching the hatch grew out of these freestone valleys. The fishing here is seasonal and hatch-driven in the classic sense: Hendricksons in April, the famous Catskill Green Drake and sulphurs through May and June, tricos and terrestrials in the summer low water. The catch is that these are rain-fed freestreams, so they run warm and thin by July and fish best in spring and fall — the honest move in midsummer is to shift to the tailwaters or fish the mornings.

Those tailwaters are the other half of the story, and they're some of the best trout water in the East. New York City's water-supply reservoirs — Cannonsville on the West Branch Delaware, Pepacton on the East Branch, and the Neversink — release cold water year-round into the branches of the Delaware, which join at Hancock to form the big wild-rainbow water of the main stem. The West Branch below Cannonsville is a genuinely technical, cold, dry-fly river that fishes all summer when everything around it is too warm; the trade-off is that flows are set by reservoir releases and interstate water-management rules, not the weather, so reading the gauge matters as much as reading the sky. North and east, the West Branch Ausable runs cold pocket water through the Adirondack high peaks around Wilmington, and far to the northwest the Salmon River at Pulaski is a different sport entirely — a Lake Ontario tributary that fills with Chinook and coho salmon every fall and steelhead through the winter, flow pulsed by the Lighthouse Hill hydro dam upstream. New York DEC sets the statewide trout-stream regulations and the separate Great Lakes tributary rules.