PEA SOUP
It was a nice Sunday afternoon. It was the second Sunday in a row that I had been off work. It was fairly cool and my wife said that I needed to spend some time at the water. Why should I argue with such a smart, beautiful woman?
It’s still to wet to drive into a pond so I headed into a pond that is not far from a road. The pond is slightly smaller than a foot ball field, but has a nice deep channel that wanders through the pond. I have a fairly good idea where the channel runs so I knew that I would be able to place the fly in the areas where the break lines would be.
I arrived at the pond and it looked like pea soup. The algae bloom was just incredible. When this happens I am never sure if the whole water column is affected or if all the algae are in the top few feet of water. No reason to expect that any of the other ponds would be any better so I stayed at this one.
I decided to try the normal flies that I have luck on. A boa yarn fly and a Godlie Jr. Several casts with each fly did not result in any fish coming to hand. This might mean that the need to go to strange things in order to produce some fish.
Put on an orange fly and another fly that was tied with bright green yarn and a thick dry fly hackle collar. It also had a fairly large bead head on it to make sure that it sinks into the water column. The dry fly collar moves a lot of water to make the fly more obvious.
I was not sure if I was hitting weeds or if the fish were just nipping at the fly. The way to find this out was to change the flies again. I have some long Aberdeen style hooks that I can tie flies on. I tie the fly so that the end of the tail is at the bend of the hook. If the fish are short striking this gives a better chance to hook them.
The fish were short striking. I hooked several fish, but they all came to the surface. When they were on the surface they had a much better chance to throw the hook and that happened way to many times. On the other hand I was at least hooking the fish.
The fish hit both flies at about the same rate. I landed about 10 percent of the fish that I hooked. Not a great percentage, but I had figured out what it would take to get the fish to bite.
Being curious I did try some other flies to see if the fish might hit them harder. I had fish hit them, but did not improve the catching part. I did get several fish close to the bank to see that they were barely lip hooked.
After about five casts with a fly I would switch to another if the fish were not hitting it hard. It gave me some practice on tying flies on, but I did not find the fly that fish would hit harder.
I did have enough fish to share some fillets. I do hope that the water will clear up, and I also hope that the amount of rain will decrease so that I can drive into some of the ponds.
Hope that you can get out onto the water.
Rick