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The night before, I'd been up until midnight
cleaning 18 bluegill and one channel cat (all
caught on fly tackle). During Daylight Savings
Time, if good fishing luck keeps you on a lake
until dusk the ol' midnight hour can sneak up
on you.
I was scaling the second bluegill when the phone
rang. It was my buddy Donnie. Would I, he inquired,
care to tag along tomorrow when he and his girlfriend,
Kahlilah, go out to a 6-acre farm pond they have
permission to fish?
My mouth said "Yes" like your knee jerks when a
doctor whacks it with that rubber mallet. This
pond holds a population of very nice bluegill
and lots of bass. For me it also holds a personal
significance - a month earlier Donnie and Kahlilah
invited me along and this was the first farm pond
I ever panfished in using my new 9-ft. 4-wt fly rod.
That afternoon, the fly rod action I had with big
bluegill had been so intense it was a religious
experience.
So the next day, the three of us arrived at this
pond geared for boat fishing - the best way to
fish a pond this size. Donnie and Kahlilah
launched first and rowed off in his small johnboat
to work the deeper water along the face of the
pond dam, both of them using ultralight spinning
tackle with 1/32-oz. fliptail jigs. I launched
my solo canoe and opted to stay in the shallows
along the opposite shore. Two boats, two depth
strategies, two equipment approaches. Somebody
was bound to get lucky today.
Earlier, the pond owner had told Donnie to keep
alive all the bass we caught - they'd be donated
to an upcoming Kid's Fishing Day event sponsored
by an outdoor equipment company. We were to put
the bass into a screened cage the owner had
installed along the pond's shoreline. To outfit
me for this collection task, Donnie loaned me a
floating trap door fish basket. Both our boats
had one.
No sooner had we left the shore than the owner
drove up, climbed out of his truck and reminded
us to save all the bass we caught. I mentioned
that with my lightweight fly tackle I would be
catching bluegills mostly. Hearing this, he
thought for a moment then asked me to keep any
really big 'gills; he would add them to the bass
so the kids could catch some bluegills, too. That
idea sounded pretty cool.
His request was a bit perplexing, though. My
first visit to his pond, all the bluegill I
caught were as big or bigger than any I've ever
seen my whole life. Which was wonderful, except
today I had brought my ice chest and it was
sitting in my canoe. When canoe fishing, I
unhook the keepers and immediately throw them
on ice; the intense cold keeps their meat fresh
from pond to scaling board to skillet. I knew
from experience that after a bluegill spends even
a short time on ice, it either dies or falls
into deep shock and cannot be revived. Once
inside the ice chest, they're pretty much history.
But this pond owner had promoted me to Traffic
Cop Panfisher. I was instructed to send all Huge
bluegills to Ice Chest Parking, but any Bass and
Humongous bluegills who showed up were to be waived
into Fish Cage Parking. Sorting each bluegill I
landed was going to be a distraction, I knew. But
as fishing distractions go, it sure beats swatting
mosquitoes.
Moving away from shore, I paddled west toward the
pond's primary feeder creek when it dawned on me
that I was zipping past a stand of cattails bordered
by 4-ft. deep water. Damselfly Territory. Best
hit this place first. On my second cast, thrown
parallel to the cat'line edge, a juvenile bass
snatched my flashback Hare's Ear nymph. His next
hangout became the interior of my floating fish
basket, and thank you very much!
Water quality in this pond is good, and today the
water clarity was excellent thanks to two days of
light wind holding down the shoreline wave breaks.
Studying a flat adjacent to these cattails, I could
faintly make out the pond bottom in water maybe 3
feet deep. Question: were any bluegill there, or
had they already drifted to deeper water what with
the late morning sun now arcing high in the sky?
Answer: Some were still shallow, as my nymph
discovered when I began fan casting it across
the flat. But I rang up only three keeper 'gills
before the flat played out and I had to move on.
Approaching a shoreline point formed by the
confluence of two feeder creeks, I was uncertain
how to proceed. Both creek coves looked good,
but I remembered from my first trip here that
both were fairly shallow. The flat I'd just
left hadn't produced many fish, so maybe these
coves wouldn't, either. Should I double back
to the pond's main body and try to mimic what
Donnie and Khalilah were doing, by working a
weighted nymph slow and deep?
Just then a few feet out from the point, two
surface swirls appeared beside a tiny half-submerged
grassy island. I eased in closer and my polarized
lenses let me see from a discreet distance that
this point was very shallow water indeed, 2 feet
deep max. It seemed too late in the morning for
fish with size to be loitering in such clear
shallows, due to the risk of predation from above?
But something was active here, something hungry,
a small bass or bluegill likely. Perhaps it
would agree to taste-testing my #10 Hare's Ear?
Splat, TWITCH, fish on! In came a Huge, which
after being unhooked found itself tucked in for
a little ice cube nap. Back into the same spot
I went with another cast, and another 'gill
immediately pounced on my nymph. Then another,
then another: I began getting a strike and
landing a fish with almost every cast, in an
area of water about the size of a pickup
truck's shadow.
Roughly every third 'gill was a paid-up member
of the Humongous Club, and those I put into the
fish basket. One of these monsters put up an
extraordinary fight. I've never had a bluegill
battle hard every inch of the way across 25 feet
of water then swim past my boat 15 more feet
toward deeper water, forcing me give line, all
without once coming close enough to the surface
to show itself. Until the very end I'd have bet
cash money it was a bass or channel cat. The Kid's
Day tykes who hang a worm in front of this 'gill
better have 6 lb. test line or they'll be running
to Mommy with stinky shorts and tears in their eyes.
In no time at all, twelve more Huge category
'gills were snoozing in my ice chest. Then I
took a juvenile bass out of the hot spot, and
this finally snapped me out of my bluegill
trance. I clipped off the Hare's Ear and tied
on a chartreuse and white Clouser's minnow.
Being new to fly fishing, over the winter I'd
studied Rick Zeiger's FAOL stories and learned
that Clousers are real good for crappie and bass.
I had not yet tried a Clouser on bass, because
I don't fish for bass anymore. But today I would
take a crack at 'em due to the pond owner's
request. With enough bluegill on ice for a
family meal, it was time for some big game
fly fishing. It seemed fitting that my first
venture into this new area was going to happen
at this wonderful pond.
I left the point and began moving parallel to
shore, inching my canoe into the smaller of
the two coves, attracted there by earlier
distant swirling noises generated by what
sounded like a big fish. On my second cast
to the weedline, I was watching with fascination
as the Clouser swam toward me through clear
water when it…disappeared. I felt resistance,
and in a minute or so I boated a nice juvenile
bass about 14-inches long. A few casts later,
the Clouser was swimming back to my canoe again,
out of sight in slightly deeper water, when
something attacked it with such violence that
it broke my 4X leader.
This month-old tapered leader had been living
on borrowed time anyway. But instead of putting
on a fresh leader, I left the old one on and
tied the replacement Clouser directly to its
broken end. My leader was now only 4 feet
long, but I guessed the line strength at its
"new" terminal end to be at least 12 lb. test.
Store bought Clousers aren't cheap, I didn't
want to lose another one, and if bigger fish
were hitting it I needed a much stronger tippet.
Unfortunately, no more heavy bass grabbed my
second Clouser, but lots of smaller ones sure
did. And not just bass, either; two Humongous
'gills did not simply mouth the Clouser to move
it out of their spawning bed. No, they took it
deep in the mouth, obviously thinking it to be
a desirable food item.
We left the pond around 2 p.m. after putting 22
juvenile bass and 6 Humongous bluegills into
the owner's fish cage. The rest of our catch
was Huge bluegills that we kept for meal purposes.
The exception was a marvelous white crappie Donnie
caught that looked to be in the 2-lb. range - one
of those sea monster slabs that keep people awake
the night before a spawning season trip, wondering
if they'll catch one just like it.
This trip marked the second time that Donnie
personally witnessed me having steady action
using fly tackle. He's never fly fished before,
despite having at home in his stash of fishing
rigs a decent 8-ft. graphite fly rod he bought
someplace years ago on a whim.
Two days after this trip, Donnie and Khalilah
and I drove 30 miles to a fly tackle shop where
he got himself pretty well geared for an initial
leap into the Great Midwest Mystery called fly
fishing. With the advantage of a stable little
johnboat to operate from, plus an outstanding
farm pond in which to learn casting techniques
and presentation tactics while catching fish,
it won't be long before Donnie's as lethal with
a fly rod as he is with everything else he uses.
That guy can catch fish out of a bathtub.
~ Joe riverat@sunflower.com
About Joe:
From Lawrence, Kansas, Joe is a former municipal and
federal police officer. In addition to fishing, he hunts
upland birds and waterfowl, and for the last 15 years
has pursued the sport of solo canoeing. On the nearby
Kansas River he has now logged nearly 5,000 river miles
while doing some 400 wilderness style canoe camping
trips. A musician/singer/songwriter as well, Joe's
'day job' is with the U.S. General Services Adminstration.
Joe at one time was a freelance photojournalist who wrote the
Sunday Outdoors column for his city newspaper. Outdoor
sports, writing and music have never earned him any money,
but remain priceless activities essential to surviving the
'day job.'
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