Nice fish Dave thanks for sharing. My experience with fishing Gurglers is similar to Aged_Sage in that the bass tend to sip them in similar to a trout taking a mayfly. No big splash where they try to kill the bait, just a quiet ripple and the gurgler is gone. I actually got out on the lake I live on for a while on Friday evening fishing for large bream with my 3wt. My go-to fly is a black mohair leech tied on a size 10 XL hook. I’d caught a number of very nice bream when I hooked another nice fish near a floating dock. It was very strong and I had a bit of a time keeping it from getting back up under the dock before I could move him to the outside of my kayak into open water. It turned out to be a nice 21 inch bass. It jumped a number of times, but the barbless hook held in the thinest of skin tissue the roof of its mouth. It’s not at all uncommon for me to catch bass with this small pattern, but usually they are in the 2 lb range where this fish was at least four pounds. I agree with the adage that it takes large baits to catch large bass, but you never can tell when one will take advantage of an opportunity to take even a small fly.
NIce photos by the way. Since I always fish out of my kayak, I don’t feel comfortable bringing my nice digital camera out there just in case there’s an accident.
I agree with the adage that it takes large baits to catch large bass, but you never can tell when one will take advantage of an opportunity to take even a small fly.
True this. I caught two of my larger bass here on #12 chironomids while fishing for trout.
At a small lake near San Diego (Lake Miramar) some really large bass, 10 pounders and up, were being caught on power bait by folks fishing for the stocked trout. Little bitty size 14 trebles with balls of goo on them…
No one could figure it out…bass, especially bass that large, don’t normally eat stuff like that.
This lake is very clear, so a local bass fisherman wanted to ‘see’ what was going on. He borrowed an underwater camera from some friends of his in the Navy, and dropped into the water from his boat offshore where there was a large concentration of trout fishermen (there was a well know water inlet at a certain spot that drew the stocked trout like a magnet).
There was a large school of trout visible, actively foraging around, occasionally eating some power bait and being caught…there was also some rather large bass hanging nearby…every once in while, when one of the trout was ‘hooked’ and began struggling to get away, one of these bass would swim up and eat it…during the time this was ‘observed’ none of the bass was ‘caught’, they just broke the line or or pulled the trout off before eating same. In the course of one morning ‘watching’ this happened four times…
But the mystery was ‘solved’…the bass weren’t eating power bait,they were eating trout and got ‘caught’ when the hook just happened to pull out of the trout and lodge in the bass’ mouth.
I’ve caught dozens of bass on small bluegill flies… and it often felt just like a bluegill strike, then suddenly I had a nice bass…I always wonder, did the bass hit that little #14 fly, or did it hit the little fish that hit that #14 fly?
The top fish…The fly is upside-down in the fish’s mouth. It may be difficult to make out at first, but you can see the hook going up. Its actually hooked in the back roof of the mouth. The fish in the bottom picture was hooked in the corner of the jaw.
Thanks for the response. Upon closer examination, I do see the hook in the roof of the mouth in the first photo. To be honest, I did not pay that close attention to the second one, as it clearly was NOT in either the tongue or the roof of the mouth.
Ask Dave to send you a link to the post where he actually hooked a small gill, waiting for a bass to take it, then fought the bass as long as possible before unhooking.
A local fisherman told me a story about how one time he did the same thing, only a really nice 8" gill, that a really, REALLY nice bass took. The gill had lodged sideways in the bucket and expanded every barb. Talk about a monstrous hookup. Landed both fish!
Living in the south, we get to see some very nice bass on a regular basis, at least watch them swim by:( I was fishing one spring and catching 12-14 inch bass at a local wildlife management area known for producing some very nice fish. The water was very stained and as I played the fish to the shore, he dove straight down about four feet from the shore. It felt like he had dug into the weeds, so I stripped the line in until the rodtip was almost to the water and I eased the fish up to the surface. What came up was a VERY large bass with about six inches on that 14 inch bass sticking out of its mouth. She must have been attracted to the struggling fish and when he dove down, she was there to greet him with a smile. I was actually stunned at the size of the fish that would try to each a 14 inch bass. After about five seconds, she spit him out and slowly swam away. I switched to the largest streamers I had (7-8 inches long) but it was no good. I never saw her again. True story even if I don’t have pictures.
