Iowa Smallies

[FishnDave]

Despite nearly saturated ground and following an overnight/morning rainstorm, I was alarmed that this small river was actually wadeable. This river has pretty much dried up a couple times during the summers in the last 4 years. By the looks of this, it will do so again this year. But for now, it was nicely wadeable and the fishing was as good as I've seen it, in terms of sheer numbers.
I flyfished for 5.5 hours and waded 0.75 miles of stream. I caught 42 Smallies, 3 Creek Chubs (a first on the fly rod for me), 2 Largemouth Bass, and one Green Sunfish.
Some of the fish came on a beadhead gold Woolly Bugger, but most of the fish were caught on an FC Pearl Shiner I had tied.






I got to watch a wild Turkey fly out of the top of a large oak tree on the top of a high bank next to the river, and fly across the river. Pretty cool. And technically I caught this "on" my fly rod, since it kept landing on it while I was fishing.

[1hook]

Looks like a sweet day of fishing

[NJTroutbum]

Dave, That looks like an awesome day on the water! Thanks for sharing!

[lee s]

Nice dark damsel,
The Russian River, here locally, used to fish quite similar for smallies. However, under the "watchful" eye of the Sonoma County Water Agency and due to their supervision, that is gone now too. And they still try to sell the idea that they are trying to help the dwindling steelhead....yeah, right. Can't even keep smallmouth in the system.
.....lee s.

[Wetsocks]

Man that's a great day of fishing!

[smij]

Gotta love the eyes on those bass! Nice report!

[appalachian angler]

That's a lot of good smallie fishin' right there Dave! Every time I get the inkling to do some smallie fishing this year, the rivers have been blownout

[FishnDave]

This is a late report....I visited the same river again on September 26. Although I feared it might dry up as it had in recent summers, the river remained almost too high this summer. I had been keeping an eye on the water levels and flow rates for several weeks. It was almost too high to wade, but I went anyway.
Early in the outing, I waded into deeper water than I wanted to be in. I backed up onto a sandy creek-mouth delta... to where I had just walked from. I took a couple more steps on it and promptly went thigh deep into quicksand. One leg was locked in place immediately, and the other was about knee deep in the same. Thank goodness I hit a hard bottom beneath it before my head went underwater. Still scary. It took some time and effort, but I got out of that mess and continued fishing.
The high waters of summer seemed to have deepened some previously shallow stretches of river, and dropped some huge trees across the river that nearly reached the opposite bank.
Fishing/catching was tough. There was a huge boulder that gave up a fish or two on every previous trip to this river, but didn't produce a single fish on this trip.
I ended up catching 8 Smallies, 2 Creek Chubs, and 1 Striped Shiner, all on a Chartreuse Pearl Shiner.














I got to watch as a flock of wild Turkeys flew across the river one-by-one downstream of me. That's magical stuff to me.

[Linecaster]

Dave thankyou for your interesting report and your photos. Glad you safely extracted yourself from that quick sand, scary. Do you have a picture of the fly you were using?

[FishnDave]

Do you have a picture of the fly you were using?

I never did take a picture of it. This is a picture of the Pearl Shiners (on the left....the ones on the right are variants) I used earlier in the season.... The Chartreuse version is similar, except with chartreuse mylar chenille for the body, and I just used chartreuse marabou for the tail because I didn't have any chartreuse ostrich. They are weighted with non-lead wire wraps under the chenille bodies.