Kettle Lake Largemouth

A kettle lake is a lake or pond created by a massive chunk of ice shoved down into the ground by its parent glacier. They are often very deep for their widths and subject to complex and unpredictable water level changes, especially when they don't have an inflow or outflow stream. The pond I fished yesterdat is one such pond. At it's deepest point it is about 50 feet deep. It has, over the years, gone so dry you could walk across many parts of it, and it has flooded so much that the surrounding homes had to be abandoned for a few weeks. Last time I fished it was two years ago, almost to the date, and it was about 7 feet higher than it was yesterday. This is not a reflection of the current drought. This drought will effect the pond in about two years.

It happens that this pond is infested with large mouth bass. There are some big ones, but what struck me the first time I fished it was the number of one to two pound fish. And I discovered that first time how easy it is to catch them!

This year is no different. I caught a few on the Plopper and few on a Clouser. But the real killer was a fly I've been experimenting with lately. It was brought to the table by Clark Pierce and Curtis Fry on Fly Fish Food: the complex twist bugger. Unlike a normal woolly bugger, which uses chenille and a palmered hackle, a complex twist uses chenille, polar chenille, and hackle spun together. It mixes them together is a way that just screams "big fish food". That fly, fished on a slow strip, caught some of the larger fish yesterday. No beasts, but I'll definitely go back to find the real hawgs.