Its rare we get a chance to flyfish in December in Iowa! I flyfished a nearby lake from Noon to 4:30pm. Action was very slow.
The ones that did strike were still very aggressive about it and fought well. I managed to land 12 trout. A guy using spinning gear stopped to talk for a bit… Said he’d caught 6. I didn’t see any of those get caught, however. I tried a lot of different flies, but kept coming back to the one that really worked… The “Chili Pepper”.
Here’s some pics from Saturday:
This one was bizarre…check out how dark and purple it is! Ever seen one like this?
Dave -
On one small spring creek down in the Central Mountains of Idaho, I used to see a fair number of very dark, purplish rainbows, even darker than the one you caught.
There were stocked rainbows in that creek, but way downstream from where I fished. I’m pretty sure the ones I saw and caught were wild fish. I usually saw them around spawning time, but since that is the time of year that I usually fished that creek, that might just be a coincidence. They might have been there year round.
Rainbow trout do have quite the extraordinary range of colors and spot patterns.
John
50 degrees when I left the office for lunch…and 58 when I got back! Ahhh, December in Iowa! :rolleyes:
Now, keep in mind all the local ponds were 100% ice-covered for about 5 days about a week-and-a-half ago. Then the ice melted off again…but the water is THAT cold!
I went flyfishing, of course. Despite the warm air temps, those fish are getting extremely sluggish. I missed quite a few soft strikes. The first first fish that decided to let me hook it was a crappie. It came in like a wooden plank. The other fish fought better, but that first one was a good indication of the fish’s activity level right now.
I ended up catching 3 Crappies and 4 Bluegills. The biggest crappie was this 12.5-incher:
All on a microjig under an indicator.
As most of you know, I keep a Fishing Log each year. I feel I’m probably done fishing for this year, so I went through my Log and crunched the numbers. Its a good way to wrap up this thread.
I fished 166 days this year, 211 fishing trips. Final fish tally is 3,112, which exceeded my previous best year by 486 fish! I caught 2,846 of those on flyfishing gear, which I used 90% of the time. I landed 34 fish over 20" in Iowa. I visited 30 different bodies of water throughout the year, 8 of them were completely new to me.
The full blogged breakdown statistics and summary is here, for those interested in reading more:
http://fishndave.blogspot.com/2012/12/2012-fishing-summary-year-in-review.html