This Limestone Stream Is a Gem

Larry Coburn nets a rainbow trout on snowy Beaver Creek near Hagerstown. The stream makes for good fishing in winter or summer. (By Angus Phillips For The Washington Post)

Virginia has them, Pennsylvania has them, but if you ask most fly-fishermen whether Maryland has any good limestone trout streams, they'll probably say no. They'll be wrong, but only by one.

Beaver Creek, just outside Hagerstown, is the Free State's lone major limestone-influenced trout stream. By great good fortune, it features several miles of public water in which to fish, including a 1 1/2 -mile stretch designated for catch-and-release fly-fishing only.

Why do we care? We care because it's February, and February is the cruelest month. It's short in duration, but drags on and on with frozen creeks and frigid, fishless bays. The beauty of limestone streams is they never freeze and never stop producing. No matter how cruddy the weather gets, you can generally find fish and the bugs they eat in these chalky waters.

"Look at all the midges," Larry Coburn, my longtime trout fishing partner, said last week as we eased along the snowy banks in our waders on a bright, crisp day. Clouds of minuscule, freshly hatched insects swarmed here and there in the dappled sunlight, and occasionally the surface of the water rippled with the slurp of a hungry trout gobbling one.

We were in the half-mile "open section" of Beaver Creek just downstream of the state's Albert Powell Fish Hatchery, a stretch in which anglers may keep two trout per day. Before the outing was over, we would bag our limits there, then move down to the catch-and-release section to hook and release several more trout on flies, including a plump 19-inch rainbow, and finish up in a section of private water in which Coburn has permission to fish, where he concluded the day by landing a trophy eight-pounder on his very last cast.

Take that, Old Man Winter.

Indeed, that final hour of fishing was spectacular by any measure, anytime, anyplace. Using spindly, three-weight fly-rods to drift salmon-egg patterns near the bottom in four feet of water, Coburn and I landed one trout after another.

After a half-dozen or so spirited tussles with scrappy rainbows of 12 to 16 inches, I'd had my fill. I took a seat on a log to soak up the lowering sun, but Coburn pressed on. "You never know when the big one might hit," he said.

There was no doubt when it did. The lunker slurped a pale orange salmon egg imitation in the deep channel but rose almost immediately to the surface, where it rolled and slapped the water with a broad, pale tail. "Whoa!" Coburn said, eyes wide.

Landing an eight-pound trout in a small stream never is easy, but it's doubly challenging on the sort of tackle at hand. A three-weight, 7 1/2 -foot rod is the whippy kind of thing you might take to the Rapidan River in July to fish for eight-inch brook trout, or to a farm pond in May to try for sunfish.

"I have to move him upstream into shallow water if I'm going to land him," Coburn said as the little rod bowed double under the pressure and threatened to snap. "I'm not sure he'll fit in my net."

The fish showed no interest in turning back upstream, so Coburn slid down the bank and into the water in his chest-high waders to pursue. Line spun off the fly-reel as the fish made a long run, then stopped and charged back upriver, Coburn reeling frantically to keep pace.