I'm fly fishing the first weekend in October at one of my favorite Pocono spots, and I'm going to pack it in early because my arm is tired.

Not from casting, which usually wears me out and sends me home, but from catching. I've just spent five minutes wrestling with an ornery smallmouth bass that keeps running back into the deep water every time he gets close enough to see me.

When I finally bring him to shore and release him, he gives me an angry look and goes back to the business of eating as much as he can in advance of the approaching winter.

I caught and released maybe a dozen fish that day, mostly rainbow trout, and this had nothing to do with expertise or preparation. I'd brought the wrong fly box and fished with out-sized streamers designed for saltwater quarry.

No matter. No cast was too bad, no fly too inappropriate, no retrieval too suspicious for these ravenous fish. To paraphrase Will Ferrell's character in "The Wedding Crashers," the fish are so hungry, it's not even fair.

These are the same fish that ignored everything I threw at them during the summer, when you have to coax them to the surface with tiny dry flies on the end of delicate lines that kink and knot and snap off when you DO hook up.

Fall in the Poconos is my favorite time to fish, because I'm lazy and it's so much easier. The weather's often ideal (not so much this year), and the trout perk up when water temperatures begin to drop in popular Pocono waters. The fish will stay active nearly until the end of the year.

"Good fly fishing continues until late November or until the water temps drop into the mid-30s," said Rob Smith of the Evening Hatch fly shop on Route 940 in White Haven, just east of the Northeast extension and a short drive to the Lehigh River, Nescopeck and Tobyhanna Creeks and Hickory Run State Park, which encompasses Mud Run, Hickory Run and smaller streams home to wild fish. (The Evening Hatch runs guide services to most local waters; details are available at www.eveninghatch.com.)

And the fish are cooperative.

Finicky summer trout that often refuse a tiny, careful imitation of a midge or gnat will lower their standards in October. They'll aggressively attack some gigantic gaudy thing that as far as I know resembles no creature found in nature.

Just a few weeks earlier, I prowled the Lehigh with an inch-long thing made of fluorescent green and yellow foam - allegedly some kind of grasshopper - and had my way with the rainbows, smallmouth and fallfish.

That kind of surface action drops sharply after the first frost, but local pros say the dry-fly action can be good on balmy days late into the season.

"Last year, it was in the 70s on Halloween, and I caught fish on dry flies," said Gene Ercolani, who operates AA Outfitters, a tackle and guide service on Route 115 in Blakeslee (www.aaoutfitters.com). He says a popular, reliable pattern for this time of year is the little blue wing olive, size 18-20.

"Most of the streams up here have little blue wing olives, and during a normal fall with decent weather we do get a good olive hatch. Sometimes in October you also see some big, brown caddis flies," he said.

Every autumn is different, this one more than usual. The higher elevations have already had half a foot of snow in some places, and a wet autumn will call for a change of tactics.

"As the waters come up and cool, streamers and nymphs [subsurface flies] work the best," said Smith, who prefers a streamer called a Copperhead or a black woolly bugger.

Another advantage to fall fishing? Still plenty of fish, not so many fisherman. The opening-day crowds are long gone. Many are off hunting, while hard-core fly fisherman are chasing steelhead on the shores of Lake Erie, or stripers at the Jersey Shore.

The crowds are thin even though the state restocks many streams in early October. The state Fish & Boat Commission stocked the upper reaches of the Lehigh above Thornhust, the special regulations (no natural bait) section of the Tobyhanna Creek north of 940, the special regs section of Mud Run in Hickory Run Park and the special regs water in Nescopeck Creek. Farther east, the commission stocked the Bushkill and McMichaels Creeks, both north of Stroudsburg.

A final bonus: big brown trout, especially in the Lehigh, begin to move toward and up tributaries looking for shallow water and gravel, preferred sites for spawning. It's usually your best chance to catch a trophy fish, but do it early in the season. In late fall, early winter, the spawning fish need their privacy.

"You don't want to disturb them while they're doing that," Ercolani said.