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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
