Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Keep Changing it Up

When you can't get known fish to take your flies for a week, you know you need to come up with some other pattern.

Tie something new.

Try something new.

So after the grey ghost, black ghost, various beadhead nymphs and even wooly buggers all get no takers, and the candycanes are now like a warning claxon to the fish, you need something subtle and effective. So I tied this batch:










Yes, there are candycanes in there. And a grey ghost. But look at those black ones. I stopped into my local shop and showed them to the guru.  He plucked the simple black one with the red head out, held it up and said, "this one will catch fish."  It was December 23 at about 4:15 pm. I drove the 3 miles to the pool I had caught numerous fish out of, but been denied the past week in. I saw swirls--as usual. I cast this one out a few times in close: got a tug. I paused. Rested the pool for a few minutes. Cast upstream and worked that section a few times. Then when I thought it was ready, I cast straight across, let it drift but with a tight line, just barely retrieving enough to keep contact. Tug-tug-lift. Fish on. No, big fish on.

This one was the biggest of the stocked rainbows I have caught yet this fall. This one knows how to eat wild food. That's why I've seen it so much.  That's also why I've watched another flyfisherman try unsuccessfully to take it. It isn't a "dumb" stocker. It has been "wild" for 2.5 months now.

But this black fly, in the darkness, had what it was looking for.


Photo:

https://flic.kr/p/21sN7x2

Edit: a couple days later (Wednesday 27th) I catch another trout, but this time on a smaller version, tied #16 dry fly hook.







A few days earlier, I actually caught and lost the bigger fish mentioned first. I was using both my own grey ghosts (see my last entry) as well as a commercial one in size 6--the one on the top in the photo:



 Only the commercial one got touched, and twice I had a big fish on, fought it and lost it. I think it was this very same fish. At one point in the dark that previous night, there was a huge splash at the tail of the pool. This trout is over 2 pounds.

Success means reading rivers etc. Matching the hatch is ok. But there are multiple ways to do that. Principally you need to try different flies!

Sunday, December 17, 2017

As the Snow Falls, So Goes the Catch Rate

It is interesting how quickly things can change this time of year. The water has been steadily cooling, even as the weather was quite moderate. But because water is a peculiar substance, the magic number of 39 comes to be significant: that's the temperature at which water is most dense. At this point, all further cooling produces lighter water--which floats and therefore freezes, and quickly.

When the cold snap hit, we got snow--two batches of it, and a 10 degree night in between. On Monday last week, we were still in the relatively moderate weather--then Tuesday had the somewhat warm rainy day, and Wednesday the cold. I had caught a trout and a pickerel on Monday. On Tuesday a friend of mine and I could not convince the trout but he got the pickerel. After the first snow, I caught a trout yet again--but changed to a different fly. The water had not yet frozen. I fished it the same way as the recent trout: with a small shot, cast across, drifted, then twitched as it starts to swing.







But On Saturday and Sunday (today) I've had no luck. All I succeeded in doing today was spooking not one, but two fish, on the first cast.

Sometimes discipline is a good thing. Which I did not possess today. The plan had been to tie on one of the smaller Sizes of flies I tied today (starting at 16, then 12) to cast to openings in the ice on the creek. But when I took my rod out of the tube, there was a size 6 brown streamer pattern on and I left it there for the first cast. This was a mistake, as it landed with a big kerplop on quiet water, and two fish spooked out from directly below and swam away. As if to punish me, I snagged it in the ice shelf and lost the fly.

I stayed another 30 minutes or more fishing in vain. It is generally better to simply abandon a pool after screwing it up like that.

The size 12 flies are on the left. There are others I didn't take a photo of yet.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Variations on a Theme

Yesterday (Sunday) I tied some variations on the Candycane.
But one I had already tied--but not fished--with simply a golden pheasant tail and a mallard wing, and hackle in chartreuse instead of white, fooled a small rainbow on its first cast:

flickr video: Small Rainbow





I also hooked into two others before this, on a #16 hook of the same pattern, but lost them. Had two other bumps. It is funny--I changed because I figured I was flubbing the takes. And yet the past few sessions I went down to #16 and did better. Who knows.

Then I changed pools and on the 2nd cast got into a really pretty native:


flickr video: Pickerel



It was classic! As I was stripping my fly through the water to prepare for another cast, a wake appeared out in the middle of the pool and so I kept the fly in the water, moving towards the bank, until the fish took it. And it really swallowed. I was lucky I didn't gut hook it. You can't see the fly because it took it tail first and the head of the fly is over 1/4" aft of the left corner of the mouth.

Interestingly when I first arrived and started walking down to the stream, I saw that I disturbed something along the shallows that swam out to deeper water. It was probably this pickerel.

Here's the fly--the top one in this photo (you can see this in a previous post as well, with all the candycanes):



Saturday, December 9, 2017

Trout Fishing Unabated




I've been fishing so much I'm losing track. I should post every day....

December 5th:



Friday:


Thursday under a bobber:



A few days earlier:



All were caught using my new candy cane pattern in size 16, fished wet across the stream with very small 1 to 3 gram added shot at the tippet knot, and no float--except on Thursday. The take was so subtle that in all cases it was basically just retrieving to begin the next cast and feeling that there is something on there.

There was a short session between these two when I watched a trout follow my own wooly bugger repeatedly. I hooked it once but it quickly shook me off. Fun to watch that--you usually only go by feel. To see the shake is illuminating. It is faster than you can react to.

And yet a few more days back--10 days ago on a Wednesday, I caught one on my big fat buzzer (see previous entry) and the strange thing was what I found in the stomach: hemlock leaves!  The green ones combined with red dying ones looked a lot like the buzzer fly:




And yet even a few days earlier on a weekend, I got one off the bridge, drifting a wooly bugger downstream and then intermittently twitching or swimming back upstream. Sure enough this worked and it exposed this pool as productive!



These two pools are just loaded with trout. The first week after the stocking, they went crazy for a brown wooly bugger, and also hit the rapala. Then they got harder. For a week or two I kind of thought they were all fished out. I'd already eaten two out of one of the pools.

But it turned out they were there. I'd see a rise and say, "aha!"

And so before going home for Thanksgiving, I invented the candycane fly pattern. Well it isn't a big invention. I'm sure it's been tied a million times. But it turned out to just drive redbreast sunfish in Pennsylvania crazy. So when I came back after Thanksgiving, I gave these pools some more time, and I quit constantly streamer fishing and started wet fly methods. And that worked.

It is really interesting, working through all the possible ways that fish might be feeding and what might interest them. But being stocked rainbow trout, these fish are perhaps especially weird. I don't think they really know what food is.  The big fat buzzer fly I made up tuned out to look exactly like a pile of hemlock leaves. I know because I took one of those fish and ate it--and that's what the stomach was packed with!

But the other three I took from these pools had very little or no food in their stomachs. They are maybe super hungry. And yet they still show selectivity. I haven't had any luck on dries, nor in the surface film. Until I put a shot on my tippet knot, the candycane wets don't get hit. The streamers did, but they are weighted more.

I am thinking of tying some variations with different colours but the same pattern, out of curiosity. The fly is really simple to tie.

1. red 140
2. green metal wire (chartreuse)
3. pheasant tail tail.
4. white hackle.
You tie in the tail, tie in the green wire, run the red forward a bit, wrap the aft quarter shank with green wire, tie it down, wrap the middle quarter with the red flossy thread, with the wire under it, then you wrap the green wire another quarter, then tie it down and tie in 4 wraps or so of white hackle, then a red head and you are done.

I have done some with mallard wings, and some with hot pink hackle, and different tails---they are actually a simple take on a royal coachman---green, red, green. From the bottom, you can see #16, then #12, then #8 baithook, #6 baithook, and a #8 fly hook with wings.

We'll see what happens.