The Adirondacks’ own Lloyd Bull, undisputed trouting king
of West Canada Creek, is reluctant to share too much information
about his river.
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| Lloyd
Bull
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Unlike contemporary fly-fishing legends born of New York waters,
such as Lee Wulff, Harry Darbee, Walt Dette and Fran Betters,
to name a few, Lloyd was never one to court the limelight. Not
that he’s a shrinking violet or without a sense of where
he belongs in the order of things, which by general acclamation
of the fishing fraternity is way up there.
After all, Lloyd Bull has the gift. Only a few have it—that
of being able to catch trout, virtually anywhere, anytime, thanks
to a constantly active intuitive intelligence that homes right
in on the natural world and solves problems the rest of us don’t
even know are there. Consequently he’s fished the West Canada
with greater success than anyone else, and he’s done so
for more than 50 years.
Raised on a dairy farm just outside the Adirondack Park, Bull
has become enough of a legend among the fly-fishing elite that
he’s tied flies for or gone fishing with many captains of
industry and other luminaries, among them Jimmy Carter. Yet he
and his trout stream remain relatively unknown to the angling
masses.
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The nimble
hands of a master fisherman |
“Good,” is Lloyd’s immediate and thunderous
reaction to that assessment, complete with his trademark beaming
smile. “Let’s keep it that way. We have somewhat of
an unspoiled river here, and the quickest way to have that change
is too many fishermen. Oh, yes, it has changed anyway, sure. It’s
a lot busier than it used to be, but one of the reasons I resisted
writing a book about the West Canada is that I know the pressure
would increase incredibly if word really got out.”
That would be some book, since Lloyd has trudged every yard of
this river, from its trickling origins in the heart of the West
Canada Lake Wilderness all the way down to where the full-blown
river joins the Mohawk at Herkimer. For most of its journey inside
the Park, the West Canada is a classic Adirondack brook-trout
stream, with deep ravines that make access difficult. Not too
far from its headwaters, the river flows for several miles through
land owned by the Adirondack League Club. These are private waters,
but from the club’s southern boundary to Nobleboro on Route
8 there is a 10-mile stretch open to the public.
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“Most of that is wadable, no more than 20 feet wide.”
Lloyd says. “And it’s little brookies in there. Oh,
but some nice ones every once in a while. Not real big. Acid rain
has done awful damage out here, so these trout have to be resistant
to survive. There isn’t much food up in the headwaters,
and there are no brown or rainbow trout up there that I know of.”
From the bridge at Nobleboro down to the Hinckley Reservoir is
another 10 miles of deep ravines and widening stream. This stretch
gets a little more attention from the intrepid angler. “This
length of the West Canada is fished mostly by spin fishermen early
in the season. It’s tough fly fishing through here, although
I have done it.”
“Yeah, come to think of it, I did catch a 17-inch rainbow
right at the Nobleboro bridge last summer,” Lloyd adds,
supporting his observation that from Nobleboro to Hinckley a fisherman
who can get down into the deeper pools is apt to find a pretty
good trout or two, most likely migrants from the reservoir or
stockies. The state stocks both browns and rainbows in small numbers
along this length.
Another hallmark of this stretch of the West Canada, notes Randy
Kulig, owner of the Golden Drake Fly Shop in Herkimer County,
is the buffering quality of the limestone at the bottom of those
ravines. Limestone neutralizes acid that otherwise can kill aquatic
life. Hence the West Canada becomes richer and richer in bug and
fish life the closer it gets to the reservoir.
From the reservoir, on the Park’s southwestern boundary,
the West Canada spills over Trenton Falls and continues 30 miles
to Herkimer, dropping at a steady pitch. Simply superb trout water,
with sometimes phenomenal bug hatches, waters loaded mostly with
fat brown trout. Rainbows are no strangers here either. One of
the beauties of this part of the West Canada is its accessibility.
No more ravines or private waters, and there’s a good state
road along its entire length.
Sitting in the Blue Rose Diner in Newport, about midway between
Trenton Falls and Herkimer, the king contemplates his river between
bites of meatloaf while his ever-patient wife Carol joins us in
holding court.
IN LOVE WITH A RIVER
“The West Canada is the best trout stream in the state,”
he suddenly blurts out, raising his eyebrows and smiling conspiratorially
as if he were letting us in on a major revelation. Carol, who
has known Lloyd and his sense of humor since high school, bursts
out laughing. He has only said this probably a hundred thousand
times in her presence. He’s a king who really, really loves
his river.
Lloyd is something else. At 75, he remains compact and trim, wiry
tough. He’s a natural athlete. As a teenager, he ran the
mile and set a state high school record that stood for 40 years.
You can still see it in the spring of his step and sureness of
his every move over a slick streambed or jangled shoreline. He’s
hard of hearing, not a byproduct of age but the consequence of
working with noisy depth-charges to sink Japanese subs more than
a half-century ago.
The eyes, though, the eyes still don’t miss a trick. Like
others with the gift, he sees fish where the rest of us see nothing
but dancing light on broken water.
Lloyd is a wet-fly fisherman, which may not be in vogue these
days, but it will be again when the wheel of popularity turns
round. It always has, so Lloyd is just ahead of his time. He uses
a tandem of three flies at once on the finest leader tippet the
situation allows, minuscule gray and brown nymph imitations that
he’s tied lean and mean. Patterns he’s devised himself.
Standing knee-deep in front of a promising run, he stares hard
at the water for as long as it takes to spot a fish. “Ah,
there we are.” He makes a single purposeful cast, not too
long, upstream, and quickly mends the line back against the current
to let his flies sink and flow by naturally, drag free. He uses
very little or no weight. A sharp dip to the rod. He plays a good-size
brown quickly and releases the fish in one smooth motion while
never taking his eyes off the river, anticipating his next cast.
It’s a rare day when Lloyd ventures out on the West Canada
and doesn’t hook at least a dozen.
“But I only keep one good one, for Carol,” he remarks.
“And then not always.”
As a young man, Lloyd could not have been in a better place, at
a better time. After the war he was at Penn State taking the first
fly-fishing course offered in the country, from George Harvey,
the dean of American fly fishing, who has remained Lloyd’s
lifelong friend. He has a ton of stories about his adventures
with such renowned anglers as Harvey, Leon Chandler, Vince Marinaro
and Lee Wulff. He can also spin tales about yearly trips to Canada’s
Great Bear Lake, where he caught world-record lake trout and once
nearly drowned.
Then there are his designs, innovations and simply great ideas,
which would fill a tome or two. Among them is the peacock herl
nymph, now one of the standard flies used on the West Canada.
After the state closed another favorite creek to fishing with
natural eggs, he devised from bits of yellow sponge the first
artificial egg patterns, “and I caught 76 rainbows in one
day, some nice ones too.” Not bragging, not exaggerating.
Out on the stream you quickly learn a 10-inch fish is just that
and no more.
Since retiring from the Herkimer Petroleum Co., a business he
built up and passed on to his sons, Lloyd has lived year-round
on Little Otter Lake on the western edge of the Park near the
isolated sand plains aptly named Confusion Flats. Little Otter
has been one of Lloyd’s spiritual homes since his mother
and father first brought him there in 1936. The other, of course,
is his beloved West Canada Creek, an hour’s drive away.
“Lloyd Bull has forgotten more about this river in a week
than I’ve accumulated in 25 years,” says Randy Kulig,
no slouch with a fly rod himself.
“Lady luck always does seem to shine on me,” the king
acknowledges with a little shrug and the appropriate royal flourish.
If truth be told, though, if you spend just 10 minutes on West
Canada Creek with Lloyd Bull, you come to realize that here is
a man who has learned to craft his own luck.
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West Canada resources
M. Paul Keesler has written the book on West Canada
Creek. Twice, in fact.
Keesler, founder of New York Sportsman magazine, has
lived by the West Canada for more than 30 years and knows it intimately.
He regards it as one of the best brown-trout streams in the state.
He swears that 17- to 20-inch fish are fairly common “and
a few 25-inch-plus fish are taken.”
If this has you salivating, you might want to read his fishing
tips in his Guide to Fishing West Canada Creek ($12.95).
He describes in detail the various transformations of the West
Canada as it flows out of the Adirondack wilderness to Hinckley
Reservoir, spills through gorges, flows through farmland and finally
empties into the Mohawk River. The book contains 20 pages of maps,
lots of black-and-white photographs and an ap-pendix listing tackle
shops and businesses.
For those who want to know more about the region, Keesler has
written Kuyahoora: Discovering West Canada Valley ($39.95).
This book covers not just fishing, but also other outdoor pastimes
such as hunting, hiking, canoeing and nature study. It discusses
the region’s history and geology. The book contains color
photographs.
My advice: If you’re going to make the West Canada a regular
fishing destination, pick up the more expensive Kuyahoora.
It is slightly more up to date, and the color photos are striking.
If the West Canada is just one of several rivers you fish, then
you can get by with the Guide to Fishing.
To order, write Paul Keesler Books, P.O. Box 485, Newport, NY
13416 or visit www.paulkeeslerbooks.com.
—John Rowan
