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Here's a shot of Pennsylvanian Chris Kocher with a pretty brown trout from the Lehigh River not far from Allentown.

Chris is the president of Wildlands Conservancy. I spent a morning fishing with him on a trip arranged through the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association, at whose spring conference I was an invited speaker.

We floated with guide Dean Druckenmiller of Fly Fish Pennsylvania on the Lehigh River. This is big water and beautiful country.

It was chilly and poured all day -- this was one of the top five wettest fishing trips of my life -- and that didn't help the fishing, which was unfortunate because I didn't get the true feel of the river, which is an amazing success story.

The river used to be so polluted with coal silt that it was sometimes called a "lava river."

"It never caught on fire, but it could have," Kocher told me.

Now it's clean and has a good population of smallmouth bass, stocked trout and a few holdover and wild trout.

Chris and I managed to catch about 10 smallmouth bass between us, and he caught two trout. On the other boat on the trip the two anglers managed just two bass between them so I think we did about as well as could be hoped for.

Most of the river's trout are stocked but there's some holdover. Flow is controlled by a dam and Drruckenmiller and other fishing advocates are pushing for more coldwater releases during the summer to help with carryover of trout.

But because the dam was constructed for flood control, cold water releases aren't a priority. It's a complicated issue, further complicated because the river also supports a booming whitewater business and those guys prefer a relatively small number of big releases as opposed to more smaller releases.

Based on the size of the water, I think Druckenmiller and other coldwater advocates are right when they say that a year-round coldwater fishery would draw anglers from throughout the East. I will be interested to see how this fishery continues to evolve.

We spent the afternoon shooting sporting clays. We shot the easy B course. I started slow but then got hot. At one point I had 23 in a row, which is by far the best I've ever shot. Then my gun started jamming so bad I had to finish with a borrowed gun and that was that.

The trip also gave me my first chance to stop by the big Cabela's store in Hamburg. Wow. Usually I have the family along when I've gone to Bass Pro Shops stores but this time I was solo and could take my time. That gave me a chance to check out the sales so I didn't spend as much money as I could have.

My one "big" buy was a new Gore-Tex rain jacket, the need for which became clear during Friday's rain. It was 40 percent off an already reasonable price so that helped.