Ashuelot River Fishing Guides and Conditions, New Hampshire

About the Ashuelot River

The Ashuelot drains southwestern New Hampshire’s Monadnock region and runs roughly sixty-four miles to the Connecticut River at Hinsdale. The USGS gauge at Hinsdale watches about four hundred and twenty square miles near the mouth and reports discharge and stage with no temperature series. It is the principal river of the Keene area, and it has changed character considerably over the last two decades as a series of obsolete mill dams have come out.

Those removals are the most interesting thing about the river as a fishery. The Ashuelot has been one of New England’s more active dam-removal corridors, and reaches that were slack mill impoundments now run as riffle and pool again. The practical effect for anglers is more moving water, better cold-water habitat in the middle river, and improved passage for migratory fish moving up from the Connecticut. New Hampshire stocks brook, brown and rainbow trout in the upper and middle river, and those reaches fish as a stocked stream through spring and into early summer.

The lower river below Keene, and particularly the Hinsdale reach the gauge sits on, is warmer and fishes as a smallmouth bass river. Fallfish are abundant and will take a fly readily, yellow perch and chain pickerel hold in the slower water, and the confluence area with the Connecticut concentrates fish moving between the two rivers. The Ashuelot is canoeable in long sections, and the paddling community uses it heavily in spring.

Flows are freestone in behaviour: the river comes up fast after rain and drops back quickly, and it runs thin in a dry August. The gauge is the practical check on whether the lower river has cleared enough to fish and whether the upper reaches still hold enough water to be worth walking.

Access

Hinsdale gauge and Connecticut River confluence - the flow reference and the warmwater end of the river.
Surry Mountain Dam area - flood-control structure and access on a major tributary arm.
Keene area river access - urban walk-in reaches through the middle river.
West Swanzey and former dam sites - restored riffle water from dam removals.
Gilsum and upper-river crossings - small, cold headwater trout access.
Ashuelot village bridge - roadside access in the lower river.
Winchester area pullouts - transitional water between trout and smallmouth reaches.

Seasons

Spring: high, cold and pushy; stocking begins and the river is at its fullest.
Summer: drops and warms; smallmouth take over the lower river and trout retreat upstream.
Fall: cool flows and good fishing throughout, with the best smallmouth activity of the year.
Winter: low and cold with ice on the flats; fishing limited to open mild-weather stretches.