JANUARY: all caught up

Sometime in the middle of winter I began to dream of fishing. Literally. Usually I dream of catching carp on warm, sunny days. The dreams are fairly true to life and remarkably un-dreamlike. Sometimes I am wading along a small stream, sometimes walking the banks of a placid lake. The sight of a "dream" carp, cruising the shallows or nose down in the mud triggers the familiar shot of adrenal excitement. I'll stalk the fish carefully and make my cast. Sometimes I lose fish, sometimes I land them. Often I'll set up my camera for a self-portrait.
The dreams are very pleasant, but when the unattainability of the experience becomes too depressing I start to search desperately for real-world fishing opportunities.
Such an opportunity arose this week. Between snows, the weather warmed to a balmy 44 degrees with a light rain. I headed out, through a snarl of traffic, to the closest tailwater to hunt for some hatchery trout. I was alone on the water, except for a flock of gulls. I worked my way along the bank, watching for signs of fish. Finally, within casting distance of the gray ramparts of the dam I spotted a rise. With all it's various ducts and chutes closed, the dam produced no current at all, but I rigged up a nymph under a small indicator just as I would for fishing a lively river and made a cast. There was a flash and I found myself hooked to a lively little fish.

I fished happily in the shadow of the dam for two hours, dodging gull guano, hooking trout, and enjoying the rain.
I haven't had another dream yet...

DECEMBER: fly style

In December Tara and I flew to Oregon to visit family for the Holidays. My younger brother's girlfriend introduced us to the latest fashion: hair feathers.
"I could tie a nice fly with those" was my immediate thought, and in fact it turns out that fly shops are the main retailer for hair feathers. So when Tara got her own feathers, I made her promise to give them to me when she took them out so that I could tie some flies.

Tying flies is a classic, almost cliched winter time activity. Many fly fishers spend these cold, dark days at the vise stocking fly boxes with a careful assortment of patterns, sizes and colors. I do not. I like to go through my flies and throw a bunch out. At the end of the process, this is how I like my fly box to look:

Above is my back-up box, it holds 90% of my flies and usually sits unused for most of the year. The box I actually carry on my person when I fish looks like this:

Between the two boxes: 44 flies. Add in the odd salt-water patterns and over-sized poppers I have lying around and you have a grand total 59 flies. For most fly fishers, the discovery that they possess only 59 flies will send them into a feverish frenzy of fly-tying. I'm not kidding. I once read a fly-tying article in which the author pronounced that he never went fishing without at least three boxes of ant flies! Three boxes? Of ant flies? Seriously? It's enough to make me question my methods. I guess I'm either doing something very wrong, or very, very right.

NOVEMBER: stripers

NOTE: I am not a big fan of winter. When the weather turns cold I get less active; I do less fishing, and less blogging. Due to a fairly cold and snowy winter so far, I've gotten two months behind in posting what little fishing-related news I do have. In an effort to catch up, I intend to retroactively publish posts for November and December.

The carp had gone deep for the winter and so my friend Toby suggested we catch some bait and try for striped bass. Our first stop was below the dam where Toby managed to hook two baitfish (herring or shad of some kind.)

Next we headed above the dam and rigged up four rods with fresh cut-bait. We had some action on one rod but whatever was out there avoided the hook and escaped with a meal. It was a bit too cold to be comfortable just standing around but we stayed out until dusk, which, at this time of year, comes at around 4:30 pm!

dig-dug

Just before conditions took a turn for the worse, and the carp all but disappeared, I spent a cool Fall morning on the water. Visibility was poor due to an overcast sky but I finally spotted a fish feeding in the shallows. Determined not to blow what I knew might be my only shot of the day, I anchored and slipped off the boat to stalk the fish on foot. As soon as it turned away from the bank and started gliding towards deeper water I made my cast. Carp tend to become more aggressive in the late Summer and Autumn so I cast just past the fish's nose and made a few quick strips. As I expected, the fish darted forward to grab my fly.
It was a small fish (for a carp) and it didn't run far. I fought it through the shallows, trying to move back to the boat where my landing net was. I could feel the fish tiring as I reached the boat, but before I could grab the net the little carp did something I've never seen a fish do before. With a final burst of energy it turned nose down and burrowed through the thick mat of algae on the bottom and into the silt beneath. I've seen carp take cover before - seen them swim under docks or into a tangle of tree branches, but this fish didn't swim, it dug.
Once it had disappeared from sight the fish just stopped moving. With the added weight of the algae there was no way I could pull it out of hiding. Instead I picked up my net, and using my line to point out the spot, I scooped deep and lifted the fish, along with a big glob of algae and muck, out of the water.

"F" for Fall

 It's been a lousy Fall for carp so far. I'm sure that I deserve some of the blame - I've missed plenty of fish and maybe I haven't spent as much time on the water as in the past. However, I have noticed some definite differences this year. For example, in the late Summer and early Fall the shallow bays that I fish have always produced verdant fields of reeds where I could usually count on finding a couple of hungry carp. This year those reeds never grew. I waited, thinking that perhaps things were just a bit late this year, but due to a lack of rain the water level has fallen and all of those shallow flats are now dry! Still, there are fish, and Fall isn't over yet.

Bycatch

I took a new friend fishing last week. Toby recently moved to Nashville from Florida and was interested in carp so I took him to one of my more consistent spots where we spent the morning (and a good portion of the afternoon!) throwing flies at fish. Toby did very well for a first timer. He quickly learned to pick up on the subtle body language of fish and had four or five very near misses. I hooked one fish which unfortunately made a sudden and explosive run and broke me off under a dock.
One thing that again struck me that day was how easy catching other species seems in comparison. At one point Toby "saw a flash of fluorescent green and flicked (his) fly at it." A minute later he had a nice bass in the boat:

 I had a similar experience this week, again while hunting carp:

Unfortunately, the carp fishing was not as good as the bass fishing. Conditions were tough and the fish were spooky. With some persistence, and some mucky wading, I finally got a carp in the net:

As luck would have it, I also brought a light spinning rod and a jar of corn. In the last half hour before we had to leave I baited a hook and tossed it into a depression where I knew carp were feeding. After about 20 minutes the reel buzzed - we had a customer! I paddled the boat while Tara fought the fish across the bay. She did a perfect job and played the fish like a pro. She was not so eager to actually hold her prize for a photo but I managed to convince her:

That's a big fish!

Special Delivery

Some time ago Drew, a friend of mine from way back, called me and asked if I tied my own flies.

"Sure" I told him.

"OK, I'm sending you something."

That was pretty much the extent of the conversation.

A few days later I received an envelope with no letter. Instead, it contained a single flight feather from a macaw!

Most of the feathers I use in fly tying are small and soft - hackle feathers, so I had to think for a bit about how to employ this unique specimen.
With some advice and inspiration from the Ronnie at the fly shop I sat down at the vice. First I tied a very simple bead-head nymph:

Next I tied in a bunch of barbs from the macaw:

 I pulled the barbs back and secured them to form an iridescent "shell." Finally I trimmed the ends to make a short tail:

I tied a couple of these "macaw nymphs" in slightly different color schemes. I gave one to Ronnie to try on some Caney Fork trout and I took the other one out just this week to try on some hungry locals: