REPEAT TRY
It is a week later. I have tied up a few other flies and want to try them on those short strikers. I don't very often hit a pond twice in a row, but I want to know if my experiments will work on the fish.
I get to the pond and see that the algae is gone from the side. The landowner had some Amish kids come in and rake it all out. He likes to fish for bass in the pond and hoped that doing this will help clear the water. I am not sure if it will help, but a lot of nutrient is out of the pond. The water was about 8 inches lower today than last week.
I have three boo rods with me today. I have two 3 weights and a 6 weight. I like fishing with boo, but feel that I need to use the other rods.
Start with a black mohair furl tailed leech, a Goldie Jr and a Hares ear type fly. If these don't work then I will change to other flies. Make a few casts and the fish are hitting the flies, but getting off. Lip hooking them again.
I had some 5x long Aberdeen hooks. I tied some black fur tailed mohair leech on the front half of these. That means that the tail is just past the end of the bend of the hook. I tied the Goldie Jr on a streamer hook so the tail is just past the bend. I tied the Hares ear so that it only covered about ¾ of the hook shank.
Tried these flies and had more success than I had been having. I would get about 2 of 5 fish that hit the flies. Had the fly close to the canoe and saw a crappie roll on the fly. Fly was in the thin membrane on the side of the crappies mouth. Fish came to the surface and flipped around. The hook tore out of that membrane. I kept reminding myself that you can't catch what you don't hook.
I worked on around the pond and picked up a few fish at each place and lost many more. Tried a lot of other flies, but the same thing would happen. Lots of fish hit the flies, but got off in short order.
I think the next thing to do is to tie the furled mohair leech with a trailer hook that is at the end of the tail. Have a size 20 or 22 hook there to see if that would hook the fish. Don't think it would be hard to tie that.
I did have enough fish to eat and to share with some friends. Same as last week it got very hot out. But it was fun to catch fish on the boo rods.
Hope you can get out on the water.
Rick
| Editor's note |
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| Rick is a prolific writer and I have a file full of his material. Some of these articles are from late last [2012] summer. |