The Goodsell Hole – Where Night Fishing Began
The Goodsell Hole was created where Mill Creek dumped into the Allegheny River in Coudersport. More than just another pool on just any river, the Goodsell Hole played a key role in the development of night fly fishing tactics. Anglers came from all around to experience the techniques, trout, and incredible community of night fishermen in this small northcentral PA town. The ideas and tactics forged here then spread to various corners of the state, the country, the world. George Harvey, the “Dean of Fly Fishing,” traveled here regularly to ply these waters after dark. Jim Bashline, author of “Night Fishing for Trout: The Final Frontier,” made no bones about the significance of the Goodsell Hole.Bashline writes: “I’m sure it must sound a bit presumptuous for me to suggest that the history of night fishing in America revolved around one particular pool in northcentral Pennsylvania. Well, here goes, and I’m sure issue will be taken, for I am not only suggesting that here is where it all started, I’m flatly declaring it.”According to Bashline, for a century or more, the Goodsell Hole was “the greatest trout-producing pool in Pennsylvania and, for that matter, maybe the entire eastern United States. A minor whirlpool of conflicting currents dominated the center of this hundred-foot circular trout factory. Goodsell’s depth in the center was calculated to be about twenty feet…The broad lip of slick water that formed its tail was the most perfectly created night-fishing spot that I have ever seen.”In 1953, in response to a flood that occurred 12 years earlier in 1941, the United States Corps of Engineers urged city councilmen to install a concrete flood channel through the center of town, thus wiping out a long section of some of the best trout water on the Allegheny River, including the Goodsell Hole. It was tragic, and a unique part of fly fishing history was lost. More than that, the texture of the Allegheny River was forever changed. Water temperatures are accelerated and water quality deteriorates as the river passes through the concrete trough through town. I’ve often taken water temperatures and found water downstream of the channel to be 6-8 degrees warmer than the water just above the channel only a mile and a half or so upriver. It’s certainly not the trout fishery it once was; its glory days are a distant memory.
Today, the Allegheny River through town is rarely deeper than several inches, and the concrete channel neutralizes any effects of even the worst rainstorms. But it’s also ugly, and I, for one, can’t help but cross this stream every day and wonder how it must’ve been back in Bashline’s day and feel the sting of remorse for something that happened decades before I was even born. Still, part of me also wonders how many other great pools, and great trout streams, we’ve lost over the decades — and continue to lose — in the name of “progress.” But another part of me would be too heartbroken to know the truth.
I read the night fishing book in my post brown trout obsessed years. I think I found a remainder copy at the New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton, MA. It was an ok book but not as good as it could have been. I do remember the Goodsell Hole stories and they evoked many fantasies of what it looked like. Finding any more info preweb was impossible but this appeared out of nowhere recently and I was shocked. I never expected it to suffer such an ignoble defeat. It went from legend to tragedy.
The scale of the flow was tiny compared to how I imagined it. I thought it would be a much bigger stream.