... to be heard by those who love to pursue bluegills and other "bream" with a fly rod. For some it is the sound of a popping bug at work. For others, it is the audible herald of a sunfish flaring its oversized gill flaps to inhale an item of food. That flair can create a strong enough force to draw a 2 inch long fly, tyed on an inch long hook, completely inside a 4 inch long bluegill. It is the reason that I seldom use flies smaller than a size 12 when I pursue 'gills and their kin. On Tuesday afternoon, it was the sound of a size 10 Parachute Patriot, heavily Ginked, being drawn under the water repeatedly.

Tuesday afternoon was a balmy December day with a high temperature that reached into the mid-70's. The sun chased scattered clouds, but the afternoon was mostly sunny. It was a perfect day to test the Parachute Patriot on bream. After all, many of us tend to follow the "bright day, bright fly" axiom. I have been tweaking a sub-surface pattern for bluegill for a year or more. It is intended to be used even in the dead of winter, albeit with a VERY slow retrieve. This iteration of the experiment was tyed on a size 12, Mustad 94845 (standard dry fly hook, barbless). It consisted of an "undertail" of tan and black centipede legs about hook-shank long, an "overtail" of red marabou about twice that long, a body of chartreuse DMC cotton floss, chartreuse ostrich herl palmered up the body, and chartreuse Ultra-wire counter-wrapped as a rib. I used red thread to tie this fly and gave it a fairly generous head. It is an attractor pattern, obviously.

I tied the tippet to the dry and let it run 6-8 inches long. Then I tied on a size smaller (i.e. 5x) trailing tippet via a triple surgeon's knot, and tied on my wet/nymph/abomination dropper. I stayed with this combo all afternoon. In fact, given a bit of rescue work, I kept these two flies intact all afternoon. This is perhaps a first for me, although it did result in several small limbs be torn away and a certain amount of groping under logs to retrieve my snagged dropper fly.

I had planned to enter the Harpeth River at a state access point, but the state had thoughtfully decided that it was too cold for safe canoeing and so they had chained and locked the lane that accesses it. I fell back to Plan B. I went to Edwin Warner Park to fish the Little Harpeth. Edwin and Percy Warner were two brothers who, many decades ago, donated their adjacent properties to the city to be used as a park. Since each of them owned a square mile or more, this makes for a very nice park. The Little Harpeth runs along the southern boundary. The Little Harpeth flows into the Big Harpeth which flows into the Cumberland River. The Cumberland River is large enough to carry a fair amount of barge traffic and has yielded catfish over 100 pounds not far from where the Harpeth flows into it. In other words, one never knows what sort of fish one might encounter in the Harpeth, or even the Little Harpeth. I have seen many bass, including smallies, in the 2-3 pound range. But Tuesday belonged to the bream.

I suited up, since the water was a bit too chilly to wet wade, and rigged up my rod, a Cabela's 6-weight, 5-piece Stowaway. I gave the other park users on the stream a wide berth and scrambled down the bank. I made several casts before entering the water and started to the good a couple of fish by the time my waders got wet. The stream is a most modest river and is sometimes referred to as a creek. It varies from a swift and shallow 10 foot width to a languid 50 foot width that can go over my waders, if not over my head. It flows through a rich floodplain and over a limestone bed that has a number of eccentricities in the stone structure as well as deposits for stone and sediment. Much of the steeper areas of bank were lined with stone by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) back in the 1930's. Some of that stone was fieldstone and much of it is subsiding into the stream. The nutrient-rich mature of the stream mean that these stones are soon covered in the ubiquitous olive-brown algae known to, and loved by, local waders. They are known as "snot rocks" due to their slippery nature. (Apologies for any offended sensibilities.) Being fairly large, flat, and relatively thin, they add to the Olympic-grade of wading challenge by balancing atop smaller stones and playing teeter-totter, or perhaps teeter-wader is a more accurate description. The uneven mature of the streambed means that the San Juan Shuffle is a recipe for a bath. You are almost certain to trip and fall. Feet must be ready to lift and balance. All of this must be done while watching the trees above for deadfalls and snakes. And watching for fish, too. There are numbers of fallen trees and the remnants of fallen trees. Structure and fish are everywhere. Bream fishing is all about structure, current, and light. Bream like to be at the margins of all of the above. Where structure cannot be seen and current is vague, cast to the boundary of light and shadow, just into the shadow.

I made my slow way upstream, stopping at times to free either or both flies from the grasping twigs around me. I nearly went over at one point where I was watching my fly and not my footing. I stepped into a pocket surrounded by rocks and lost my balance. I bent my knees to get a lower center of gravity and dragged my other toe into a rock substantial enough to hold me. Fly fisher's pirouette: 1, Dunking: 0. I managed to wade less than a hundred yards before I discovered a feature previously unknown to me. I found a steep drop-off into a narrow pool that was deeper than my waders. Again, I managed to stop a bit shy of taking on water. But I had ruined a good pool. I turned around and cast back toward a fallen, sweeper log that abutted a large sycamore which hung over the stream. I got a very good hit, but I missed the strike. Fishing a dry and dropper combo gives me the opportunity for far more magnificent wind knots than a single fly alone. I got to spend several minutes trying to sort out one of my better ones.

I know that I am middle-aged because I have started using the word "Buddy" when somebody is behaving in a way that appears to be a bit less than cordial. In this case it was one of the standard banes. A duck hunter was giving one of his dogs a workout with a large float. The first hint that I got was a foot-long cylinder of white plastic hitting the water 7 yards from me, followed by a much larger dog.

"Hey Buddy, wanna move that someplace else?"

It turns out that he hadn't seen me, standing near the bank quietly working on the Mother-of-all-Knots. He was very polite. He apologized. And he called his dog back. Even his dog was polite and well trained. It was out of the water in a couple of seconds. All in all, it wasn't a bad encounter. By the time that I had my leader sorted out, the pool had calmed down and I took two or three more fish, a mix of bluegills and pumpkinseeds to 6 inches. All of them fought well. One of them, a 3 inch long pumpkinseed, valiantly charged my knee. Actually, he was just looking for cover. A note to the wader, bream will use the fins to hold against cover when hooked. That cover can include your waders. This is not good for the waterproofing of you waders. If you are wading wet, well, wear long pants. Another pumpkinseed kept swallowing the dropper as I tried to pull it out. It shut its mouth firmly and I had a hard time gently opening its mouth and clearing the fly with my forceps. I take that as a sign of the fly's popularity with the local sunnies.

After finding my new pool, I moved back downstream to the now-vacated gravel bar from which I often fish. I waded upstream into the first pool by the bar and caught a bluegill and some sort of a minnow. I moved to the middle pool, a turbulent bit of water with a number or pockets and a couple of large eddys, and caught another minnow. I moved down to the main pool and got 1 pumpkinseed and several missed strikes. Finally I waded out to waist depth and was surprised to be standing on a bottom of sand and small gravel. It was the easiest wading of the day. I flipped my combo along the edge of the pool, steep and walled by the CCC with quarried blocks. More good 'gills took my flies. I watch a gar work further along the wall, slashing sideways into the wall and pinning small fish for its supper.

I started to head back upstream, but the light was fading and with it, the activity of the sunfish. I couldn't be anything but happy. My new chartreuse thing had caught most of the fish. The parachute fly has also scored, and it also made that oh-so-satisfying <plop!> every time it, or the dropper, got hit.

Regards,
Ed