It was a surprise encounter. Each of us traveled roughly 350 miles, meeting on an inconspicuous gravel bank outside an unincorporated rural town.  I was looking for trout. It was looking for love.

The last thing I expected to  catch on a size 16 crippled sulphur emerger on the East Branch of the Delaware River was an American shad. Many trout had been caught by this point in my trip. Nearly all of them fell to dry flies of one sort or another. I should have expected to catch something other than trout, though. As there are all sorts of foodstuffs drifting atop the water at any given time, all manner of fishes can dimple the surface. Rises may be trout. But fallfish, dace, and panfish will break the level as they feed. I’ve caught bass, carp, and even catfish on dry flies intended for other species.

As far as I can recall, every shad I’ve ever caught has been on a shad dart. This jig excels at getting right in the face of goal-oriented anadromous fish as they move upstream. One could argue that it’s colors and erratic movement mimics some baitfish the shad are used to. I maintain it is simply a nuisance that the shad would swat away with their hands if they possessed such appendages. As is the way of fish, their mouths have to do.

This startling shad not only rose to the dry fly, but it pursued it from upstream. Something about this finely tied mayfly imitation spurred a creature that had moved over 500 kilometers in one direction to turn 180 degrees. Skill tinged with faint traces of happenstance is where I’m at, presently.

As there were trout feeding in front of me, I assumed this was indeed a trout. All I saw of the feed was a silvery flash and a splash subsequent to my hook set. After that, it was just bottom-diving runs and the occasional surface commotion. I had the sense something was up with whatever took my hook. Truthfully, I was hoping it was an enormous rainbow; none of the brown trout I had caught in the previous days acted anything like this. Coaxing it in closer carefully, protecting the 5X tippet, the decidedly un-trout silhouette came into view.

Being confounded by bycatch on a trout stream is not too frequent of an occurrence. Since the environmental margins of such watersheds are relatively narrow, there isn’t a smorgasbord of diversity; at least at the niche salmonids occupy. A sucker or a rock bass may pop up now and again. Largely, you know what you’re getting into though. As a river gets larger, and as it flow unimpeded to the ocean, the bag gets decidedly more mixed. I would have still been surprised, but not staggered to the point of calling the local paper, to catch a striper, an eel, or even a walleye.

Following a long fight and a few quick pictures, the scaled cubit of muscle shot back into the current. Testing all my knots and checking my hook point, I pondered a few things:

• Would I have preferred a trout of similar size, even if the fight would have been inferior to the shad?
• Had another brown taken my fly, as I intended to happen, would my “success” been more satisfactory?
• Is there something qualitatively better about catching a native species using my method of choice?

I suppose the best answer to all those questions would be to just fish so much that it all ends up being a wash. As it stands, with only a few days on the Delaware a season, I’m happy I was locked into a struggle with an unanticipated fishy foe. Plenty of unremarkable trout came to hand. Only one fish wasn’t predicted. There was only one fish that logged over 300 miles, reciprocating my effort.