Rivers Change

[waskeyc]

I've been fishing the warmwater creek behind my house since I moved there in 2009, mostly in a deep pool adjacent to a large rock that juts out into the water. This rock forces the stream to change directions, and the bottom is scoured out under it, making one of the deepest areas I'm aware of on that creek. Because I can stand on the rock and cast, and because it's just about the closest access point to my house, it sees most of my fishing attention. I occassionally go downstream to several other pools, but rarely do I take the time to go upstream because the steep clay banks and deep water adjacent to that spot make it difficult.

However, as we all know, things change. On my stream, there are usually 1 or 2 large floods a year that raise the water level up to the banks (about 8 feet above the low water line) and reconfigure the bottom. There are also beavers that come and go, building dams which eventually get washed away, and burying sticks and branches on the bottom. Last fall, several beavers buried a large amount of tree branches just upstream from my rock. The floods over the winter and spring buried those branches almost to the waterline in silt, dramatically shrinking the volume of deep water around the rock. This spring, I've had generally poor success for redbreast sunfish and smallmouth bass compared to previous years from that location. Downstream has also seen marginal success, and I was concerned that the fish populations were in a lull.

This weekend, with only a limited amount of time, I went down to the creek and for some reason I went upstream (actually, it was to follow my kids, who were trying to catch minnows). I climbed down the bank above the hole and out onto a sand bar that was exposed, wet wading upstream into the flow. I immediately saw several sunfish move away, and quickly hooked a small bass. I also noticed several rocks on the bottom in knee deep water in an area that in previous years had only been ankle deep and covered in sand. As I moved upstream, I noticed a sizeable logjam had collected on an old tree that had been leaning across the creek for many years. What wasn't obvious until I got closer was that the same floodwaters that dumped silt near the rock had carved out the bottom below the logjam. I caught a handful of redbreasts from that hole, and realized that the fish weren't gone, they had just moved to a better spot when the old one became less desirable.

As you can guess, the next time I make it to the creek, I will revisit the new hole.