Dry Flies, Wet nymphs

Tara and I just returned from a trip to Oregon. It was good to visit with family and friends, and I did get a little bit of fishing done. We met up with one of my childhood friends at the Oregon Country Fair (NOT to be confused with a county fair) where we watched a band perform The Beatles entire Abbey Road album. Somewhere between "Octopus's Garden" and "I Want You" we got onto the subject of fishing. Jared is one of the most accomplished outdoorsmen I know, so it didn't surprise me to learn that he was re-exploring fly fishing, something he hadn't done much since he was a kid. Not one to pass up such an opportunity to fish and catch up with an old friend, I made arrangements for an afternoon of fishing on a small trout stream near town.
We fished through the afternoon into the evening. The fish largely ignored our nymphs, but when the sun dropped behind the trees, the trout started rising to the big dry fly that Jared was using as an indicator. Joining in the fun, I also tied on a dry fly and we fished several riffles as the dusk deepened. I landed a few small rainbows. Jared hooked the fish of the day at the head of a deep pool, but alas, the wiggly fellow managed to throw the hook.
I'm pretty comfortable fishing smaller streams but big water, like the Blackfoot in Montana, or the McKenzie in Oregon has always given me pause. I'm never sure where to start on a bigger river. The riffles seem so large and powerful It's hard to believe any fish would choose to rest in one, and the pools can be so deep it seems like you'd need a hunk of lead just to get your fly deep enough.
This trip I spent two mornings fishing a big run of riffles on the McKenzie River and finally had some success. I decided that on bigger water I should try a bigger indicator and rig it farther up my line - in this case a large white Thingamabobber all the way at the top of my 7ft. leader. This seemed to work pretty well. The first morning I had fish taking my unweighted nymph on the drift while on the next morning they seemed more interested in the retrieve. In a total of maybe 4 hours on the water I hooked about ten fish, but landed only one.
My brother Noah had requested fresh fish for lunch so this unfortunate little hatchery fish went straight from the river...

onto the grill!

Fresh fish delish!

The Doctor is IN

Among other things, my friend Matt is a whitewater boater - definitely what I would classify as an extreme sport. However, he insists that he enjoys the reflective nature of fly fishing enough that he occasionally joins me on the calm water for an adrenaline-less morning of fishing.
Matt is not a "fisherman," that is, not someone obsessed with catching fish, but I finally decided that I couldn't watch him cast flies to empty water any longer. So, I took him out to the river with a spinning rod and a tub of nightcrawlers, a guaranteed recipe for success. Sure enough, Matt spent the whole morning hooking and unhooking hungry sunfish:But Matt's had a big summer; he and his wife are having a baby this fall, and Matt just successfully defended his thesis. He is now a Doctor of Mathematics! Bluegills just don't do these events justice, so I took Matt out for a morning of big game hunting - a.k.a. carpin.' I landed one fairly big fish, and Matt landed the second:

 To be totally honest, I hooked this fish on a San Juan Worm, but I handed off the rod and Matt did all the manual labor - playing and landing this nice specimen. In the end, I'm not sure who had the bigger smile, him or me.

Smoky the Carp

Back from the Smokies. The park is heavily trafficked but so well managed that it's still a pleasure to visit. The weather was pretty good during our visit, but the twice daily thunderstorms had really filled the rivers. When I stopped by Little River Outfitters to pick up some flies, I found out that Little River was flowing somewhere above 600 cubic feet per second. To put that number in perspective, the average flow at this time of year is around 150 CFS! Moreover, the creek which I had hoped to fish was closed due to agressive bear activity!
I took a few hours to walk up the headwaters of Little River and fish a few spots. I'm really only a "fair weather trout fisher" and so when conditions are abnormal I don't have the skills or experience to adapt. Consequently I wasn't expecting to catch anything and I wasn't disappointed. Still, it was great to get into the mountains and cool down a little bit.
On the way back to Nashville, we stopped by a lake for a picnic lunch. I was hoping to hook a few bluegills after we ate, but the shoreline didn't look very fishy. I commented as much, and our friend Heather, a Tennessee native, replied that she knew of a nearby spot where people fed bread to big carp. That got my attention and as soon as I finished eating I ran off to look for these hungry fish.

Two carp can be seen here. One in the bottom right corner and the other just behind the white goose.

I soon found them and within a few minutes I had Tara, Heather and Michelle chumming with bread while I rigged up my fly rod. I don't have any bread flies in my collection so I simply took a plain orange nymph and hooked a piece of bread crust on it. My first cast put the bait right in the middle of the feeding fish and in less than a second my indicator was jerked underwater. I only had the fish for a moment, long enough to tell it was pretty big, before my leader snapped. Repeated casts were less successful. The bread quickly became soaked and fell free of the hook. The carp were really keying in on the bread and wouldn't look twice at my carp bugger. But they were interested in my indicator, a white Thingamabobber about the size of a chunk of bread.
I have said this before, and I'll say it again: we don't catch fish with hooks or flies or rods or reels. We catch fish with our brains; we catch fish because we are smarter than the fish. I watched those big lips break the surface and gulp at my indicator, and I thought for a couple of minutes. Then I reeled in, slid the indicator all the way down the line until my carp bugger was hanging maybe half a centimeter below it, and recast. Once again a carp gulped at my indicator as soon as it hit the water, but this time it also gulped down my fly which did it's job and hooked firmly in the fish's mouth. I played the fish hard, trying to keep it away from the nearby piers and pilings. I was without a net, but with a little help from my friends, we got the hungry cyprinid on shore for a photo:

The end of Spring

I went tailwater fishing last week. In the south that usually means fishing for trout, but with the water warming as we near the middle of June I had a feeling there weren't any trout left in this particular spot. Anyway, I had bigger fish to fry. I was trying to find gar, which I had seen cruising this stretch before. Barring that, I thought I'd try nymphing for buffalo, which I'd also seen feeding in the area.
Niether plan worked out. A thunderstorm that morning had caused one of the feeder streams to jettison clouds of yellow silt into the river. In this situation, many species stop eating altogether, and besides, the water was opaque, making spotting fish pretty much impossible.
So, I found myself stuck upstream of the feeder creek where the water was still clear, standing in the middle of the current and drifting nymphs along the shoreline for bluegills. In classic nymphing style, I let my line swing all the way downstream of where I stood, and slowly took out the slack, causing my fly to "rise" in the current just as a live insect might. Sure enough, just at that critical moment my indicator disappeared and I felt a fish. To my surprise though, the fish jumped clear of the water, something bluegill don't do, and indeed I saw that I had caught what was possibly the last remaining trout of the spring:
I have been known to badmouth trout from time to time, but standing there in the cool current with this shiny little fish in my hand, I found myself suddenly wishing for high mountains and cold clear streams.
Still, the next day it was nice to get back out with the big boys:
Post Script: My wish may soon be granted. We're planning a short trip to the Smokies next week, and I may be able to sneak off for an afternoon of fishing...

Broken Hooks and Broken Hearts

I've lost a lot of fish this season. Human error, broken tippets, or simply coming unhooked. Breaking a hook, however was the final straw for me:
I tie these little worm flies on stainless steel saltwater hooks. The fish that snapped the bottom one wasn't even that big (for a carp anyway,) and not nearly as big as the monster that broke my line a few days before that.
So I went shopping. I bought heavier tippet and new, larger hooks. I tied up a bunch of carp flies and hit the water again. The conditions are still pretty bad. The water remains very murky, much worse than last year, but the carp are active and I can usually find a couple in the shallows where they can be caught:

This action shot is a self-portrait. The fish decided to go for a bit of a swim so I had time to reach over and set the self-timer on the camera.

I usually take a picture of a fish as soon as I get it out of the water. It's a posterity shot, just in case it escapes before I can take a proper photo.

The "proper" photo.

Fish in a Bucket

If you fish one place long enough you end up with a pretty intimate knowledge of the bottom. You remember where the stumps and the rocks are, the channels and drop-offs. This is especially true with carp fishing. When the surface is rippling and the water is a little bit cloudy, it's easy to spot a big carp, and only a dozen heart pounding casts later realize to your great embarrassment that you have been trying to catch a log.
Unfortunately, on heavily used waters, not all the submerged obstacles are natural. About three quarters of the way along one of my favorite flats is a small red bucket. The type of bucket a child would use to build sand castles at the beach. The other day as I approached this spot I saw a suspicious cloud of mud. Curiously I approached, and saw a carp feeding with it's head stuck completely inside the bucket! I must have waited poised for a minute or more. Each time I thought the fish was done I'd see the tail quiver and the head disappear into the bucket again. When it finally emerged, I made sure that my worm fly was the first thing it saw. You can guess how that turned out:
Sure made me wonder though, what was in the bucket?

Under the Lights

Night fishing season has started! My secret spot under the lights is a great place to hunt carp on hot summer nights. It's still early in the season so it's mostly the "small" carp that are feeding in the shallows:


The stretch of shoreline where I fish is not very long. Each time I hook up, the commotion scares most of the feeding fish away and I have to wait patiently for a while before they begin to come back. On this night I was able to wait them out and catch a second carp before packing it in for the evening:


Even though night fishing for carp is about as simple as can be - the main requirements being patience and stealth, I was reminded that even at it's easiest, catching carp is tricky business.