ChuckNGaleRobbins.com
The Riverkeeper
The Riverkeeper orginally appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Penned by the late Mike Sajna this was a fun read for me and my Spruce Creek pals. Mike was a fine writer and a good friend who died way too early. Riverkeeper is a position I held for about 10 years at the venerable Spruce Creek Rod and Gun Club. Founded about 1900 the club owned/leased fishing rights on about 7 miles of the famed limestone spring creek. During my reign we completed extensive stream improvement greatly benefiting the stream’s wonderful wild brown trout and aquatic insect populations.
Blue trout. Chuck Robbins has seen blue trout!. And he's not talking about fresh hatchery fish tinted gun metal blue by a life spent in concrete chutes eating processed food. He is talking about fish the color of a cloudless blue sky.
"It's really a weird thing to see," said Robbins, river keeper for the Spruce Creek Rod and (inn Club in Huntingdon County. "I just think it's fascinating. But I've never seen it in the literature and I read all the time. And the biologists who I've talked to don't really have an explanation."
Actually, the literature Robbins has read claims that trout cannot live in underground streams. But he has watched many trout swim down into a spring that feeds the club water and disappear. He has no idea how long they might stay underground but when some of them reemerge they are blue.
"You can sit there and watch for hours and they don't come out," he said. "I don't know where they go and I don't profess to know. But it wasn't too long after I was at the club that I noticed when a ' trout came out sometimes they were bright blue, striking blue." Like chameleons, Robbins assumes, the blue trout return to the normal colors of browns and rainbows once they are back in daylight.
Blue trout is only one of the many interesting and insightful fishing and nature tales to be found in "Odyssey at Limestone Creek," a memoir of Robbins' years along Spruce Creek. "If I have a favorite part of the book, it's the interesting things that I've seen along the stream not necessarily having to do with catching fish," he said. "When I watched the goshawk try to take the fish away from the osprey. That seemed like a once in a lifetime deal for me, then I saw it two nights in a row.
The stories include almost a decade of work as one of Pennsylvania's only river keepers. The occupation of river keeper is well known, among sportsmen in Europe, but practically unheard of on this side of the Atlantic. England even has produced a river keeper celebrity of sorts in the person of the late Frank Sawyer, creator of the Sawyer Pheasant Tail Nymph, and author of "Nymphs and the Trout" and "Keeper of the Stream."
Although Robbins and Sawyer share the title river keeper, Robbins believes his job on Spruce Creek is quite a bit different than Sawyer's job was on the chalk streams of England. For one thing, Robbins and his part-time summer helpers probably do more stream improvement work, such as bank stabilization and cover creation.
"We do whatever has to be done," he said. "We do everything from maintenance of the building to maintenance of the stream and stream improvement work. We raise several thousand fish each year. We take care of the guests. We take care of the members' needs. We also monitor water quality and insect life."
Sawyer's physical involvement with his streams was more limited, centering mainly on the grooming of stream grasses. Sawyer also had a lot more time to sit and ponder what he saw in his streams. He then would use what he learned to help his employers catch fish. Robbins Collects information on insect hatches and provides tips for clubs members and their guests, but in a more limited fashion.
Like Sawyer, however, Robbins does have a fly that has served him well. An unassuming person, he claims to have heisted it from club member Craig Hartman, an Altoona physician. It is a bead-head nymph that he ties in sizes No. 12 through No. 18. He ties it by slipping a copper bead (thou black and brass beads also work) over the hook, then tying on a body of rust-colored sparkle dubbing.
"I really believe that if you put that fly on January 1 and took it off December 31, you could probably catch trout on it almost every day on Spruce Creek," Robbins said. "But a Pheasant Tail would do the same thing. It's just a cheap, easy, poor man's quick way of tying a fly that resembles a Pheasant Tail. I've used it all over Pennsylvania, all over the country really and it works pretty well everywhere. Hartman I think would agree."
Robbins came to his current profession through an interest in fishing and trout that goes back to his boyhood along Fishing Creek in Columbia County. As a youngster, he would spend hours lying on his stomach watching brook trout in the bottom of that stream.
"It was like watching through a brightly lit window right into the living room of the showcased trout," he writes in "Odyssey." "In fact, that, is how I caught my first trout: lying on my belly, dangling a wriggling red worm in the hideout of a hungry brook trout living under a tangle of eroded live roots. Not much science there, but effective, and exciting as hell for a 6 year old."
From Fishing Creek, Robbins moved to the trout rich country surrounding State College in 1964, and then into what he describes as a "shack" along lower Spruce Creek in 1981. Today, he lives with his wife Gale at the Spruce Creek Rod & Gun Club. He was hired as the club's river keeper nine years ago. He sought the position because he saw it as an opportunity to both turn his love of fishing into an occupation and improve trout habitat in Spruce Creek.
Along with fishing, Robbins also has had a long time interest in writing. After publishing a number of magazine and newspaper articles, he decided to try a book. Originally, he had wanted to do a hunting book, but the timing was bad. Instead, he opted for a fishing book.
Since Robbins had been keeping a journal about his experiences along Spruce Creek, he had plenty of material to work with. He wrote "Odyssey" over a single winter and self-published it under the imprint of Tussey Mountain Press. Since he used an experienced editor, graphic designer and artist, though, the book, unlike some self-publishing endeavors is a professional production.
As it appeared on the scene just last winter, Odyssey has been well received. The first printing is already nearly sold out.
Many anglers also will identify with Robbins’s start as a serious fly fisherman. It began one day when his father brought home a bamboo fly rod that he had won on a punch board at the local American Legion Post. The rod was made in some Asian country and was so bad Robbins could tell it was terrible even at the ripe age of 10.
To go along with that rod, Robbins acquired a collection of flies, the kind that once sold for 88 cents a dozen and always included a Mc Ginty Bee. With no one to tell him that flies are supposed to match specific insects, Robbins tied on whatever he felt like whenever he felt like it. And he still caught fish.
"My 5-year-old grandson can tie a better fly than some of the early flies I fished with," he recalled with a laugh. "Some of the early flies I tied were really amusing, too. The first fly I ever tied was awful. I looked at it and thought, I'm never going to get this part."
Robbins' fishing horizons really opened up when he turned 16 and bought a 1950 Studebaker for $25 and a brand new rod out of the then-wonder material of fiberglass. Of the two, he considered the rod the more important purchase because it allowed him for the first time to think about casting under, instead of into, the hemlocks that overhung his favorite streams.
In the years that followed, Robbins' vehicles and equipment continued to improve, as did his lofty goals and horizons. At one time he thought of perhaps casting flies to every single piece of trout water in the state, “Hell why not all across the county, he laughed, “I ain’t quite made it yet in either case but not because I haven’t tried. I’m finding there’s just too damn much of it.” His attitude toward fishing also changed. It went from being obsessed with numbers, catching 300 trout during the month of May, for instance, then topping that number in June, to a more rounded approach. Many days now, he walks down to Spruce Creek to simply sit, enjoying everything around him, sometimes not even bothering to wet a line.
While acknowledging that few anglers have the luxury of living as close to good water as he does, Robbins' approach still holds a lesson for fishermen who often think it is useless going fishing because fishing magazines claim it is the wrong time of day.
"Working along the stream has really given me a lot of insight into what goes on because I see things that I wouldn't see if I was working somewhere else and just visiting the stream in the morning or the evenings for a couple of hours," he said. "A lot of times we'll be working on the stream in midday when there isn't supposed to be anything going on and all at once there are trout rising everywhere. It can be a good time to go out."
"Odyssey at Limestone Creek" is no longer in print.