I went down to the Bear River Saturday evening for an hour or two of fishing. Didn’t catch anything but I did get two strikes on two consecutive cast. That was pretty exciting. What surprised me was the way the first one hit.
There were 3 fish rising in a way that I could float a fly past all 3 in a single drift. As the fly went past the last fish I’d let it swing out of the way and then pull the line in to cast again. Now, when I’m pulling in the line I have a totally non-natural drift. In fact, it’s the opposite of a natural drift, I’m pulling the fly in against the current. So I wasn’t expecting anything when I was pulling in the fly but THAT’S when they hit.
I was totally surprised, I thought I had snagged on something but then the line started to wiggle. For just a second or two I had him but then he shook it off.
I was pretty excited so I was TOTALLY not ready when I cast upstream of the first fish when HE hit it! I set the hook but he shook it off as well. Wow, that was amazing to get two hits on two cast.
The sun was going down and it was starting to get dark. I’ve found that there is a magic 20 minutes or so where the fish are really rising but it’s almost too dark to see the fly on the water. The fish were going nuts and I just tried to keep my fly in front of them. But then the bats came out.
At first I only noticed 3 or 4 of them splashing against the water to pick up the bugs on the water. Several times they dove at my fly and turned away at the last moment. Pretty soon there were at least a dozen bats swarming around us. I did a cast to my rising trout and I felt a “thump” in the middle of my cast as my line fell to the water in a loose pile. I actually hit a bat in mid-air with my fly line!
I roll cast a couple more times but I couldn’t even see the fly any more. It was time to head home.
What a fun time, and what an interesting experience it was to share the river with the bats. Every now and then we humans are reminded that we’re part of the environment rather than lording over it. As I was standing in the river in the dark with a dozen bats swarming around me I felt like I was part of the river. I was experiencing the river coming alive at night.
About the first hit on the upstream retrieve. What fly were you fishing? I’ve known caddis flies to skitter around on the water and some will make it upstream. Many times trout really key in on the skittering flies.
It was a pale evening dun imitating the small white mayflies that I see floating down the river. But when I retrieved it the fly went under the surface and that’s when they hit it.
This past Sunday morning on my way at 6:00am to go fish, bambi runs out and “WHAM”. No more Bambi. Minimal damage to the car bumper and I’m glad it wasn’t Bambi’s mother that ran out in front of me.
Then I stop to get gas and buy some duct tape to hold the turning signal light in place knocked out by Babmi and I notice something weird hanging on the antenna.
It was a bat wing. No bat attached…just the wing wrapped around the antenna.
The downside is that I only got one fish that day. But I hit my creel limit with mammals…although I’m lucky I didn’t get stopped because I don’t have a bat stamp on my license.
Here is a Bat I caught a couple of years ago. I was trying to grab my fly when he beat me to it and hooked himself. Lucky it was a big streamer and a barbless hook, my buddy took a picture and then all I did was turn the hook up so he would fall off. It just hooked him in one of his wings, I presume he lived, he flew away anyway.
That magic time is great. I love being on the water at bat-thirty. All kinds of crazy stuff happens at that time of the evening. After learning about the Fledermaus from the folks here I tied a few up, but have not been able to get out with them yet. They are so named because they are allegedly effective at that time of day if I understand the story right.
a couple years ago, a friend and i were fishing a favorite stream at dusk. we noticed bats diving near the water and he commented that another man had told him of hooking a bat on the same stretch we were on.
a couple of casts leter, i snagged on my back cast. instead of the usual breakoff, i remained snagged in the tree limbs. working my way back to the snag, i found i was caught in a tangle of leaves and leader hanging from a low limb. on closer inspection, i was snagged on a bat that was tangled in a mass of leader and hanging from the limb.
i whipped out my stats and leatherman and in a couple of minutes had freed up the bat (and my fly as well).
i know someone will speak up aboput the possiblity of rabies from a bite or just a nasty infection, but i just couldn’t walk off and leave the poor thing tangled and let it starve or die of slow dehydration. i don’t know it it survived or not, but i felt better having tried to help.
was it the same bat the gentleman had hooked some days earlier? who knows. i just thought it was an example of catch and release appllied to something other than fish. also cleared a piece of mono that didn’t belong there. a win/win all the way.
A bait fisherman would put a hook in him and toss him out there for big brown bait. Never heard of a brown eating a bat - spose it happens - they eat everything else.
I’ve caught four bats in about as many years. I feel bad when it happens, so now I try to leave the water when they start invading my space. The thought of having one hit the back of my head on a forward cast is creepy, but I love the things.
If you go view some of Joe Humphreys videos…I think it was the Night Game fishing one, he talks about skittering may fly patterns…particularly in low light conditions. He iss showing a white fly hatch in the piece, where you could see that the flies don’t just dead drift down the river. He started paying more attention to this when he had the same experience as you. He would get the perfect dead drift and no interest from the fish…but when he was stripping it back he noticed that they would take it. Now he uses that technique quite a bit. I’ve had the same experience. Its fun when you figure it out and your getting them and no one else is. 8) Actually…the more I catch, the more i realize that movement is key. It’s just figuring out what sort of movement. :lol:
Bats are not the horrible little vermin many people think. They eat more bugs than you can possibly imagine, pollinate desert plants, and so on. for more actual FACTS, as opposed to what people know… http://www.batcon.org
If you catch one, the safest way to get it loose is to cut the tippet and give the fly to the bat. He will get it loose. The reason they get caught in the wing is that they catch insects with their wings or the membrane between their feet, and then transfer the insect to their mouth while they fly. Every bat I have ever caught was in a wing.
They do heal rapidly. Puncturing a wing, unless you break a bone, will not hurt them much, and they will be fine in a week or so.
Best not to handle them if you do catch one. They bite, not because they are vicious, but because they are scared and this huge thing is trying to get them. They are no more likely to carry rabies than other mammals, but as with any wild animal, if you do get bit, keep the bat and contact the health department. Best to cut the line. They are kind of fragile, too, so it is easy to hurt one if you handle it.
I have friends who night fish on Taneycomo who catch bats every now and then during a cast. A few rods have been broken. Reason number 332 why I do not fly fish at night.
When I first got my digital camera a few years back; I was messing around with it in the dark while I was fishing the Sulphur hatch on my local bat infested stream and got this shot by ACCIDENT:
When I went fishing later that month upstate and had a zillion bats flying around me; I took a million pictures in the dark and got not a single bat in any shot.
