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I headed out on Saturday morning for a short fishing excursion. A fairly
good friend had died Tuesday night and his services were at 10:00 am on
Saturday and I wanted to be there to support his kids. That meant that I had
to be off the pond at 8:00 am to be home and have any fish cleaned, get
cleaned up and get to the church.
I went to a pond that was only a few miles away. This is the pond that Joe
Hyde and I went to when he came and helped me put the anchors on my canoe.
It has nice sized bluegills and bass in it. I had three rods with me, a 3
wt, a 5 wt and the 10 ft 3 wt that I built. I thought that I need to use it
more to see if it will work better for me. I find that most of time I have
to have more line out to get the rod to load and make a decent cast. It may
be my casting technique, but it has not worked as well as the 7 to 8 foot
rods in the same weight.
I got to the pond and started working my way around it. My history at this
pond tells me that fish can be all over it and at any depth. You just have
to cast and experiment with flies to see what is going on. I had covered
about a third of the pond, getting a few fish, when I did one of those
wonderful casts that caused the leader to wrap around the end of the rod
and the fly line to go in all sorts of directions.
I pulled the two sections of the rod apart so I could get to the tip end
easier and started undoing the mess. I had not noticed that the fly had
dropped into the water until the leader was moving against my arm. I then
noticed that the line was moving and there was a fish on it. It was a nice
sized bluegill.
If it works once then try it again. I still had a little bit of line to
untangle, so I let the fly drop again. Bingo, another nice gill on the fly.
By this time I am beginning to get the idea that the fish want the fly to be
dropping and not moving horizontally.
The line was free so I put the rod back together and cast the fly out and
let it drop. Wouldn't you know it? I had made a loop on the end of the fly
line to make it easier to attach leaders, as I do poor nail knots. I put
some small shrink wrap on it, in red. A fish came up and hit the red on the
fly line. This time I was a little quicker to catch on.
I changed to a red boa yarn leech and cast that fly out. It had just hit the
water when it was inhaled by a bluegill. This was a good size fish and
worked very hard to not let me gain any line. This fish was just under a
foot long. She went back into the pond.
I thought this might be a good time to try the 10 ft rod and put a red boa
yarn leech on it. Every time I cast it out and let the fly drop I would have
a fish hit the fly. When they hit the fly, they were hooked. They were
taking the fly with authority. Most of the time I had to use forceps to
remove the fly.
I did try a few other flies, but nothing worked like the red color. I also
picked up a few bass in the 4 lb range and they were great fun on the long 3
wt rod. They are still swimming in the pond. I continued to cast all over
the pond and have fish try to annihilate the fly. If I had been there for
another hour or so it would have been another 100 fish day. They were
hitting that good.
But I had caught several and released more than I kept, because of their
size. I ended up with 29 fish at home. It made for some good eating.
I hope you can get out on the water when you have more time than I did this
morning, but I would not have missed the services. ~
Rick
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