My daughter created a fishing club and they took their first outing recently.
Here's some of the results.
There were two fly rods and three ultralight spinning rods in play. The spinning with little tiny curly tail grubs on #4 were the pickerel catchers exclusively. I did get some bumps though on my fly, and caught myself a brook trout as a "consolation prize." haha. Well I think it was a triumph actually--as this creek was not stocked since March!.
https://www.instagram.com/choatefishingclub/
These little pickerel are really lively and neat looking. And they wriggle all over the place. Really difficult to catch when they fall on the ground!
If you look them up, they are native to Connecticut and a close relative to the grass pickerel which lives further south and they rarely grow longer than 12." They like muddy bottomed streams, and they rarely come out to play unless the water is really low and clear, which is exactly what it was like. This stream is a torrent in the spring but a trickle in the late summer--even after the wet midsummer we had.
There is something endlessly fascinating about the relationship between the inland riverine and the coastal littoral, and there is no better place to fall in love with appreciating and exploring this interaction than where I live: coastal Connecticut. Within the tidewater (on the predominately freshwater end of it), less than 2 miles from the open Sound, I've caught yellow perch, largemouth bass, fallfish (a member of the chub/dace family) and of course stocked and holdover trout. (The wild sea run salmo trutta will come someday). In this water, at the very same time, I've seen alewives, peanut bunker, large menhaden and blue crabs both living and dead. The striped bass and bluefish chase these baitfish all the way up the river and feast on them--side by side with the resident largemouth bass. One of these days there will be the possibility of catching both the saltwater stripers and the freshwater largemouths out of the same water at the same time!
Here is a fallfish taken from my "homewater" on Sunday morning, just 1 mile from my house and 2 miles from the sound:
My business peregrinations take me through central/northern/eastern Connecticut on a regular basis. There are dozens of rivers, streams, brooks and even lakes there that I would like to fish. However because of the demands of both home and work and the time it takes to drive, it is a rare treat to be able to take advantage of these locations. When I do, it is a real treat. Of course one of the major draws is the native brook char (whom I have been obsessively chasing), but as I've discussed previously, this is not so easy to achieve. Yet there are other natives to be found, and these can be just as satisfying if you allow yourself to consider that they too are wild fishes, selectively feeding in a natural environment.
One of my favourites, perhaps because they are reminiscent of catching a brook trout, is the fallfish.
I caught this one above one evening on the way back to Boston. It is somewhere in northeastern Connecticut--the "Quiet Corner." You can see the legs of the fly popper it took hanging out of its mouth. I caught a few of them and because they are exuberant surface feeders it is a thrill to watch them strike the fly.
Below is another one (or perhaps one of the other dace/chubs) I caught in a delicious brook hiding in central Connecticut:
I caught it just yesterday (Monday) morning. It was a lovely day.
In another post I'll tell you about the bass I caught later in the evening in Massachusetts---too much fishing for one day haha!
Finding native brook trout is not easy. So far, I haven't been successful in CT. Not that I have found lots of streams. The trick is finding possible candidates, with public access, and somewhere to park.
On Saturday I went to one such place.
I never found the trout, but boyoboy did I find tiny bluegills! I think I broke my record for smallest fish caught on a fly.
At the end of the day I switched to #24 flies. Truly tiny. And the littlest fish became nearly the exclusive prey. As I waded up the brook, I'd feel the faintest of takes. Most I lost before landing. It is very hard to both feel a take and hook a fish on such small lures. I used 5x tippet. This was actually thick for this purpose but I basically can't handle smaller.
