INTO THE WIND
Rick Zieger - Nov 17, 2014
It has rained again and it was way too wet to try to drive into a pond. To wet in many places to walk where there is no grass, too much mud on your feet. That means that the canoe will not be loaded.
I grabbed two rods and a couple of fly boxes. I also grabbed the fanny pack that has a few fly boxes. The fanny pack is getting dilapidated but still allows me to take a few more fly boxes. I headed out to the pond near the university football field. Since it is surrounded by grass I can walk without parked someplace on the side of the road. I do wear rubber boots when I go here. I know the grass would be wet and I did not want to stand in wet shoes. Twenty years ago I would do it but not now.
I got the rods out of the cases and headed for the far end of the pond at the dam. The pond lies north-south with the dam at the south end. The wind was blowing about 15 to 20 mph out of the south-east. We had over 3 inches of rain the last two days. The only decent thing about this is that the ground is so wet that the water just ran off and the pond was really fairly clear, and so much water has come in that the algae that would normally be on the surface was gone.
I had two 5 weight rods with me since they have little more heft to cast in the wind. There is a hare's ear type fly and a white rubber legged boa yarn fly on the two rods. Both have worked well in this pond before.
I cast with the hare's ear first and got a few bluegills when the fly dropped a long time and came in slowly. I tried the white boa yarn fly and got a few more fish, but I am wondering if I am missing many more as these fish were hooked very deeply. I wondered if the wind was not allowing me to see many more strikes.
I tried some casts that are more with the wind and retrieving back to me. This did not work very well and I wondered if the fly is staying up to far in the water column? I changed the white boa yarn fly to another one with a 2.5 mm silver bass bead head. I hoped this would stay deeper on the retrieve. Casting it out and bring it in I got near the break line in the pond and picked up a nice bass. I returned this to the pond. I made several more cast and picked up one more bluegill.
I moved along the dam making few casts with each fly in each place. I picked up a few fish in each place, but never found a group of fish in any place. I got toward the west end of the dam, where the drain pipe is, and I moved past this about 30 feet and started casting again. In this area the wind was moving the fly line to the side some. As I bring it in I did pick up a few nice crappie. I keep casting in that area and picked up about a dozen nice fish.
I decided to move around to the west side of the pond and cast directly into the wind to see if the wind had pushed food to the west side of the pond. Both flies worked here. I cast them out and let the wind push the fly line in. At some point the fly line would go down and that meant a fish on the line. Retrieving the line moved the flies to fast. After several fish I changed to some other patterns to see if they might work, and I caught several fish on them also. There seemed to be a huge concentration of fish in that area. At that point it started to get darker in the westerns sky and I decided to head home and take of the fish before it rained again. It is not fun to fillet fish in the rain. I got home and got them taken care of and got cleaned up before the rain started. I had fillets to eat and share.
Hope you can get out on the water.
Rick