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Trout on the Wyomissing:Historic creek good in reliefI was looking for a trout to hook into early one April 2011 morning, but gotten skunked on the Allegheny Creek, located south of Reading, PA. After a morning spent tearing through brambles to get to a good spot on the Allegheny Creek without even a nibble, I started to think about what was Plan B? It didn't take long as I said to myself: "Cripes, the Wyomssing!" No offense to the Allegheny. But it's located along PA Route 568 as it runs from its headwaters to the mouth at the Schuylkill River, just below the crossroads of Gibraltar. There is very little parking as a I drove upstream from Gibraltar and where there was parking was filled with SUVs and pickups because the Game Commission had stocked it the day before. I didn't find a spot that looked trouty were I could park until the intersection of 568 and Evergreen Road. I popped around there on both sides of a bridge, getting hacked apart by brambles and wild rose bushes, with nary a nibble. So I said "Cram, it!" and left for the Wyomissing.
The Wyomissing Creek runs a historic trip from its headwaters near the intersection of Routes 625 and 568, through Mohnton, a town that once had a "Navy Yard", meandering then along long-gone Revolutionary War rifleworks, to a museum and park in West Reading where folks feed the ducks but are not supposed to. The creek is apparently fed along with way by a series of springs. Makes sense. How else could the wild brown trout survive all year?
At a spot I found on the Wyomissing, the water temp was 52 degrees as was the air temp. There's this spot where the creek rushes down a somewhat narrow trough, through a deep pool, and I caught a 10-inch native brown on a nightcrawler and a 13-inch stocked rainbow on orange Berkley Power Bait. I thought, "Strange. Nothing on the creek stocked yesterday. Two trout on the creek stocked 30 days ago." I tried to keep that in mind, to always have a plan B, or if you need to, make one up along the way.
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