Madly Effective Spinning Lure

My local bait and tackle expert, Captain Morgan, can be held responsible for my straying into spinning tackle rather than fly fishing exclusively. He's quite convincing--not to switch, but rather to learn to use all techniques--including bait (the latter has been the most difficult skill of all for me to acquire).

Because I can't cast straight--I mean, really--I can't!--it took some time--as in months--for him to convince me to spend the $10 it cost on one single small freshwater sinking lure. How could it be any better than the $5 Rapala--which he has also pointed out can be very effective?

Well it all came down to conversation. I found that the grey ghost fly--with the orange body and silver tinsel segmentation--was deadly effective on yellow perch. In fact they have yet to take anything else from me on my home waters. I also caught some fallfish on them. He pointed out that in fact it probably looks like a dace to the fish. "Try this lure." (It looks like a dace, complete with orange fins and scales drawn on).

OK, fine. So I bought one, and proceeded to lose it. In the garage. Got stuck while moving the rod! Yet to find that. Of course that put me off the whole affair for another couple months.




Then along came my overuse injury. And my decision some days back (I fish way too much!) to spin fish the Shetucket (see previous entry) and my rather hasty Walmart purchase of one more Rapala on the way, to supplement the multiple Rapalas I have already acquired while flyfishing. (I've made more money in finding other people's lures than I've spent in lures this year! Well almost anyway, if I pretend small trout flies aren't lures...).

After that trip, I was keen to see what else I could do. And curious about the stocked trout from the 1st week of Oct. So I stopped in and plunked down a 10 spot, and proceeded to catch all those trout in just minutes on Tuesday in the rain. So I knew the lure worked.

Oh, wait--I never wrote about that! Yet...(Sunday catching a striped bass on the sound and seeing little tunnies 40 yards away ,Monday on the Shetucket, Tuesday crazy stocked trout bonanza, Wed and Thursday in a pond in 'chusetts, what the heck, I'm fishing every day!)


Today, I went to a pond in Massachusetts that was stocked with rainbows a week ago. Reportedly they were "killing it" there all weekend. And considering the numbers of unlicensed undocumented foreigners who poach these lakes around here, I wasn't too sure what to expect. And it turns out I was half right. I didn't connect with a single trout (and I worked the whole pond perimeter especially the deep).
But on the other hand, Holy Cow, this lure was extremely effective shortly before dusk, finding everything else.

1st a yellow perch, so that goes to that theory! As with the trout on Tuesday, it took only a few casts. That was at 5:30 P.M.

Next came a really fat sunfish. As in well over thrice the weight of the perch and a hell of a fighter.  This was at 5:36.

And then, along comes a Chain Pickerel--goodly sized--hammered the lure as it was almost back to shore, in the shallows. Nice fight! Only my third ever Esox family fish.

 

4th on the hit list was a young largemouth bass. And in true bass fashion, this one hit the lure--first cast to yet another spot--as it landed. At 5:47. 

But that wasn't enough. I move to yet another spot (each fish was from it's own location--I only took a few insurance proof casts after each catch before moving). The first cast brought a strike and a fight--I saw the flash of a perch--its distinctive coloring--and lost it in the shallows.  Then just moments later, at 17:55, I hooked up a big handsome calico bass.

 

So that  was that, and the bite was off. Actually, I almost lost that lure. I made a stupid cast -- it went 95 degrees off target up into some trees. It is a miracle of acrobatics that I managed to crawl out and get it back! By that time it was getting dark; I tied on a twirly worm and kept at it--for another hour as usual. But with only half a dozen touches.

No trout, and 15 miles of driving. Again. (I went last night too--and caught 2 bluegill and 2 bass--half on flies half on lures--including a rainbow trout Rapala, with its duckbill missing, and a bluegill on a read worm fly pattern--another one of Cap'n's suggestions).

So that's 30 miles total driving & nine fish, and I didn't keep a single one. They didn't smell as good as the crappie I caught on my Connecticut pond, and I had a bad experience frying up one of these crappie a couple months ago, it reeked of acrid gooseshit. And when the 2 dozen geese landed last night as I was casting that little bass fly popper, I decided that was not going to happen again.

Chasing Salmon in Vain

Well, I've been fly fishing so much, that I've injured my elbow. So I switched to primarily doing spinning, with the other hand. So far so good.

Last week I caught a largemouth bass that way, after work and before dinner:




Here's a video of it:

A couple weeks ago, Connecticut stocked a little more than 200 "excess broodstock" atlantic salmon to the Shetucket River. Because of a quirk in my schedule, I had a chance to stop there on the way home early today.

Salmon!

Last year, we were unsuccessful.

So far, same thing.

But it is beautiful and I caught two other fish in quick succession.

The first one was a heavy bluegill. It was super greedy and went after a "rapala" floating balsa swimming lure.
Video of the bluegill encounter:

I actually snagged it under the chin with a trailing hook. This is especially ironic because the unusual tackle arrangement is designated by the state, to make snagging salmon more difficult. If not a fly, you are limited to a single *swinging* hook and no added weights (but the lure can be heavy and sinking--no weight up the line--so no bobber either.)

Then I switched to a longer heavier similar lure in a different color, but with the swinging hook under the belly. I'm pretty sure this is also kosher but will follow up. I caught a young largemouth bass this way:

 

Unfortunately I threw it back, but caught nothing else for the next hour and a half, even after switching to flies and casting with my other hand. There were rises but nobody wanted my offerings.

The bass was the right size to eat. Darn.

The lure fishing was not easy to do well. I can cast further with my fly line by far!  I don't think I have the match between rod and lure down and I also don't have the right motion methinks. Or I am trying too hard. Sometimes it goes really far when I don't try.

I Am A Predator

In the end, I am a predator.

I went to a pond during the storm, and caught four fish. But the trout got away, darn it. However that was more than made up for by two three things:
1. The beautiful trout I caught in the morning and,
2. The 11" Calico Bass I caught and ate.
3. The silly little baby Largemouth that swam up and took my lure just as I was starting a back cast.

The pond is very clean. And the fish was delicious.

Trout are Back (they never really left)

Well this year has been nothing like last year fishwise. In pretty much every way. The wet spring and cool damp summer was totally opposite 2016's drought. Trout had a chance to survive more successfully.

And that brings me to the current post. This morning I landed my second fall trout--out of the same small stream. This stream is pretty heavily stocked in the spring. Apparently it was not stocked this fall. It is not on this list:
http://www.ct.gov/deep/lib/deep/fishing/weekly_reports/currentstockingreport.pdf

Which means I've been catching natives or holdovers. They *look* native--very beautiful, natural, clean fins with beautiful markings matching the surroundings.

This morning I put on my father's old Converse rubberized cotton hip waders, my L.L. Bean vest that my father bought me as a kid in the 70s, and  I grabbed my great uncle's 6.5 foot Orvis Battenkill, put my father's Hardy LRH Lightweight on it, and tied on a Royal Coachman, my father's go-to fly.

I think I had my father and my uncle on my mind. Just a bit. But that's what fishing is for me: a lifelong connection to my father. Trout fishing. On small streams. Being captivated by his magical ability to tease trout out of any stretch.

This morning's fishing was a brief blissful interlude in a rainy windy day. But Connecticut is a beautiful state. There are pieces of wildness -- vibrant wildness -- tucked right into suburbia.  This particular stream is on the outskirts of a major town (one with close to 40,000 residents) and about 15 miles from one of the state's 5 largest cities. And yet it is more rural/exurban than suburban. That is the magic of this state. On this stream, I've heard and seen ravens, river otters, kingfishers, beavers, deer, and lots of other wildlife. There are redfin pickerel, dace, chub, trout, and sunfish on this stream. There may be other species too that I haven't seen or caught yet. It runs through a woodland--keeping the temperature moderate and this summer, pretty cool, even though it is fed from a small not particularly deep lake.

When I came back to fish it a few weeks ago and we saw trout, I assumed it was the September stocking but apparently that isn't the case! (It hasn't been stocked since March).

I crept up on the pool that we'd seen trout in a few weeks back. Came up from below. I crouched on my knees, and while watching the water before casting, I saw one rise. Aha! There's definitely a fish in there!  It only took a few casts to get a strike. The first good cast that landed near the rise. It was a difficult bit of casting--trees behind, tall grass to the left, branch directly over the pool and bank with trees to the right. A narrow sidearm casting lane over the grass and under the trees was the only way, other than trying to roll cast. But the overhead branch was my worry there--roll casts are trouble with branches over the target.

But after two strikes and three tangles in the tree behind, and then no more takes, I figured it had seen the fly enough and wasn't interested in that one anymore. So I changed to, of all things, I tiny littler balsa bodied popper, in bright fall foliage colours.  On the first good landing and 3rd cast total, without even twitching it, he came up and took it.

Now as I am fishing light bamboo, the set of the hook is subtle but with persistent pressure. I just waited a tiny beat longer than the first strikes that I lost from being too eager, and the fish was on. It would have been a great film.

But I did get a film of the fish while it was recovering in a little pool:

It sure looks like a native. Even if it is a holdover.

Now I just hope--hope!--that it spawns. The problem though is that this pool is heavily traveled and pretty frequently fished. I'm afraid someone else may harvest this fish. But if the immature bald eagle I saw on the way home gets it, I'll be okay with that.

The Long Skinny Fishes

After my daughter had such great success with her fishing club a week ago, I had to give it a try myself on the same stretch of creek.

This little brook is 20 miles inland and feeds to the sound but where I was fishing it is completely isolated from the salt water fish by a series of mill dams (there is a program to add fish ladders but that hasn't happened yet). At this time of year, even in this rainy summer, it has very low flows. It feels completely different than it did in the spring when I was catching stocked trout out of it.

Very slow water, muddy bottom, lots of cover = perfect redfin pickerel habitat. Which is what she caught, and what I caught too. It only took me about 1/2 hour. I "saved" the good pool for last--I wanted to explore a bit. And after tying on the trusty elk hair cricket/hopper pattern, I took one long cast across the favoured pool. The fly landed gently, I let it sit. Then I gave it a couple twitches and from the bank came a wake--as if there was a submarine--when the wake met my fly I lifted the rod tip and had my quarry hooked!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7GObeJmCp8

That was Friday. Then on Sunday the 1st  I was driving back from my son's college after making an emergency violin bow delivery. I only had my 8.5 foot 5-weight in the car, but there is a tiny brook on the way back. Unlike the first, it does see anadromous fish. But so far in 3 attempts I have never caught anything there. This location is about 4 miles upstream from the tideway. The water in the creek was really really low, really clear, and really slow. Instead of starting on the brook, I walked right across it and got over to the pond that feeds it from the side. I figured there might be something -- a bass perhaps -- hiding along the bushes along the bank, so I made sneak casts around the corner from a nice open spot. This went on for about 10 minutes with no result.

So I changed tactics. From that same spot I simply roll cast out 90 degrees into the open--but near the outflow to the brook. There were a lot of lily pads and other water weeds along the bank out about 15 feet. I figured there might be somebody hiding in there.
Well, it worked! A couple casts into it, my fly landed gently at 40 feet away, and there was a flash, and a wake heading straight for my fly. As the wake met my fly, once again I lifted my rod tip and fish on! But this time it was a chain pickerel, not a redfin. And it was bigger. In fact it was quite a good fight. It was the same length as my rod handle plus just under an inch--this makes it just under a foot.

Unfortunately no pictures ---I left the camera in the car.

What is really satisfying about this past weekend is that it was the first time I've ever caught any of the long skinngy fishes. I've always been curious about them. And now I'm even more interested in catching more of them, including the fabled northern pike and the muskie.