Tautog Time!

There's been a bit of a lull in my normal bass haunts, the bait that was there and the bass that were on it have moved on and the quite warm weather has kept the rest of the bait in the back. There have been tiny fish up in the bays, like really small ones, but that's not really what I'm after. I poke a few and then I'm done. So on a really slow bite this past Saturday, Noah and I read the writing on the wall, and, well, the wrasses were going to save our asses.

We collected crabs, an essential fa part of a tautog slam, and made our way to some rocky outcroppings that were sheltered enough that we could drift slowly enough to fish effectively without a drift sock or anchoring. We'd been out two days prior and had tried togging. Noah anchored and quickly lodged it too firmly to get it out. He had to cut the line. This and other experiences trying to anchor small sit-in kayaks have made me weary of it. I also just don't like the hassle. So I look for slow drifts. With a light north wind it didn't take long at all to find a slow drift over a pile of tautog. They were small but they were very willing. And at any size, these fish pull like crazy. I love them.

After about a half a dozen tog I set the hook into something behaving very differently. I had a suspicion what it would be, and that was soon validated. It was a big beautiful oyster toadfish. And yes, I did just use beautiful to describe this fish. Let you preconceptions go and look and the striped patterns of this fish's dorsal, pectoral, and caudal fins, and the cryptic pattern of its body. Also look at the skin texture and general shape of the fish. This is a creature that has evolved perfectly to survive in the niche it does. Imagine it in ambush at the base of a boulder covered in vegetation and algae. To me, that's beautiful. A fish living in it's nice and just being perfectly matched to it. Fish are so damn cool.

Tautog are often called ugly too. And of course I beg to differ. How is the fish below ugly?

Soon a southeasterly breeze kicked up and made our little hotspot inhospitable before we could get a big fish. No matter, I had a plan B and it turned out to be dynamite.

For about an hour before sunset until just a little after, we were on the best number of tautog I'd ever encountered, with a much better average size. Neither of us succeeded in landing a big white chinner, but I did come away with an encounter that left my jig bent and my nerves fried.

All this got my really in the mood to fish for these awesome little monsters, so expect to see more, hopefully some on the fly, and hopefully a few really large ones.
Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

CT Kokanee on the Fly

Noah and I are running out of local lifers, especially large local lifers. Especially in freshwater where we really had only a handful of micros and endangered species (which we don't target, for obvious reasons). The only freshwater "gamefish" I had left to catch in CT were tiger musky and kokanee, Noah only had kokanee since hasn't counted hybrids. We had to get kokanee this year. Last year we tried one time. It was too late, too cold, too windy, too snowy, on and on and on. It was just an extremely poor fishing day. Our only day targeting kokanee this year was the polar opposite, an absolutely lovely fall day to be up in the Northwestern CT hills. Now, I guess I should give some background for those of you that don't know what a kokanee is. Kokanee are the landlocked for of sockeye salmon, having naturally diverged roughly 15,000 years ago when melting glaciers facilitated their geographic isolation from sea run sockeye. Sockeye are a strange salmonid, continuing to feed on zooplankton almost exclusively through their entire lives. As such they don't rise to hatches or feed on baitfish, and the fishing methods used to catch kokanee outside of spawning season can be quite unique. Like their other Pacific salmon brethren though, they let their guard down during the spawning run and can be aggravated into striking flies and lures. Also like Pacific salmon, when they start the spawning process, that's the beginning of their end. They die after they spawn. CT DEEP maintains a small number of stillwater kokanee fisheries through capturing adults before they spawn then stocking the offspring back into those bodies of water. They likely wouldn't produce a wild fishery on their own, but it is interesting to have these fish available to us. 

 Noah and I wanted to time our trip to coincide with the spawn, preferably fairly early when the fish are the most fired up and easily triggered into striking. I started to get a little nervous when we circumnavigated the lake and saw only two carcasses that had been there a while. It wasn't until we got all the way around the lake and back to where we'd started that we found a bunch of kokanee. Noah hooked and boated one one his first cast into the school, of course it flipped right out of the kayak and we then both struggled for a long time to land one. Getting them to strike wasn't actually that difficult. Changing tactic frequently and just sticking to it got results. The fish would seemingly ignore a presentation for a long time before suddenly slamming it, or just progressively get visibly more and more irritated before snapping. We both got tons of takes, but a combination of factors including the small size of the fish, their jumping, and their tooth filled narrow mouths made them very hard to hook and keep hooked. Almost no takes resulted in hooked fish, and most of the fish we hooked threw the lure or fly. To make things even more frustrating, the fish were grouped tightly and moving about, so they often snagged themselves. I stuck mostly with barbless hooks so I could shake off snagged fish. Evidently people are going specifically to snag these fish. While we were there a man came along, snagged the biggest female there, and then kept it. Snagging is obviously low, but keeping a rotting, spawning salmon is just stupid. Someone also pulled up next to us and asked "snaggin anything?". People either aren't patient enough or just don't know that these fish will mouth the right presentations. Or they don't care, and that's honestly probably the case. Noah and I could have snagged every kokanee in this place twice pretty easily and then taken tons of photos to share all over social media. But what really would the point of that be?
No, we were struggling to catch any at all, but if I was going to catch a kokanee it had to eat the fly.

And lucky for me one did, I hooked it, it stayed on through a couple of jumps, and it didn't shake the hook until I had it in shallow water where I could keep it from making a break for it. I edged on step closer to my goal of reaching #150 before the end of 2019.

Lifelist fish #142, sockeye salmon (kokanee salmon), Oncorhynchus nerka, Rank: species

Noah eventually got one too, and we soon left those obnoxious little demons to their business. Honestly, I'll need an entire year to forget how frustrating they were to want to go try to catch one again. I'd love to try to get them in a river, that seems like a lot more fun, but I'm fairly certain that closest that kind of fishery exists in Colorado.
So, now I'm down to a dismally low number of local species I still need to catch. This is getting hard. Time to move!
Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

More Blitztober

Noah and I hit it right again on the 19th. It was a rough day for the kayaks but we had bass blowing up peanut bunker for hours and hours. Thanks to a text from Mark Phillipe we made a last minute change of plans and, though we showed up fashionably late and didn't see much going on initially, it wasn't long before the stripers and gulls started making a ruckus. 

It was a day variety in terms of fishing scenarios. I hooked up casting in open water with no visible breaking fish, casting into breaking fish, trolling, up in a creek, blind casting from a rock, sight casting in the wash on a sand beach, two hand retrieving through heavy blitzes, overhand crawling the fly around and under thick schools of peanut bunker, and dead drifting and swinging a flatwing in heavy current. This is one of the things that keep me in love with stripers. There are so many ways to fish for them, even with one rod, one line, and one fly along a one mile stretch of beach on one day.

 Noah and I both caught a ton of fish this day. I also got some tremendous blitz photos, some of my favorite ones I've ever taken. Unfortunately they are pretty revealing of the location, and though at times I'm fine with somewhat revealing beach blitz photos, these weren't ones I'm comfortable releasing for anyone and everyone to see. The place is actually a little consistent, not many places are as consistent anymore. One of the benefits I extend to my top tier patrons on Patreon are exclusive monthly posts. Since I've only got a few top tier patrons and anyone generous enough to render financial support to my crazy exploits can't be half bad, I will share them there... enjoy, generous people, and I can't thank you enough!

Though the weather is honestly absolute garbage for consistent fishing, Blitztober isn't over yet. Noah and I had a little bit of action this morning and we are expecting much more tomorrow. Here's hoping....
Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

Even More Small Stream Monsters

This has been the year of the small stream monsters for me. I've caught more wild trout between 14 and 22 inches from small CT freestone streams this year than any prior year. Two wetter than average years in a row resulted in ideal conditions for some of the older fish in the streams to grow more rapidly than normal. That, combined with a number of discoveries I made, lead to me getting onto lots of exceptional small stream browns and some excellent brookies as well. And although we transitioned into a bit of a drought this fall, some windows have opened after the passage of storms that have produced more excellent fish. On one recent outing I had wanted to fish a much bigger stream that I haven't been able to since spring, but found it much too high and a torrent of leaves and debris. My plan B was good one, but the day wasn't done throwing punches. The prior evening I'd been mousing for wild brook trout and whacked the tip of my 5wt, the only rod I was carrying, against the top of a culvert while attempting to cast under it. It didn't break then, it broke while I was rigging up. I popped off the last inch and a quarter of the tip. Without a back up rod, and being many miles from home, this might convince someone else to call it a day. I'm not one to let that kind of thing stop me though. I spliced the tip with gorilla tape and continued with what I had intended. And I got a gorgeous some-teen inch wild brown within the first ten minutes. 

Confidence bolstered I continued fishing with no more major mishaps or slowdowns. The conditions were ideal for streamer fishing, and I never had to change off of the white marabou muddler style streamer I started out with.

It wasn't much more than an hour into the outing that I found the biggest of the day, a drop dead gorgeous female who had clearly made it away from a close encounter with a large bird of prey. She was a gem, another real small water monster. Fish like this don't come easy in CT. It takes work to find them and almost as much to know how to approach, fool, and land them. I've said it before and I will say it again: there is no shortcut. Hard work, lots of time on the water, and good mentors are priceless.

A little ways upstream I encountered another healthy female specimen. This fish wasn't nearly as long but had girth to compensate. I'm aure she's just chock full of eggs.

Though I didn't get another fish over a foot long, I hooked a couple, and some of the fish I didn't lose made up for size with uniqueness. Check out this hunchback beauty.

And the fiery adipose on this lean and mean hen.

That wild trout can make it in these sort of small urban and suburban streams no longer surprises me like it does some people, but it will never stop impressing me. No, nature didn't intend there to be brown trout here. We put them here, and now we unintentionally compromise the places we put them. In spite of that, they power through it. These fish are tougher than we are often led to believe. That isn't an excuse to continue damaging the streams they live in, that needs to stop. But it's good to know they, as well as many other non-native and native species alike can take a beating and persevere.
Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

Blitztober

October is the month of the blitz in CT and RI. Every month from April through December could feature some spectacular feeding frenzies from a variety of different predator fish and bird species on a variety of different forage fish. But in terms of pure theatrics, big shows put on by the fish and birds in combination with the weather, the time period between about the first of October and the 15th of November has become my favorite time to chase the blitz, more and more so for photography now than for fishing. Rapidly cooling backwaters and increasingly frequent north winds push bait out of backwaters and out into open water, where migrating striped bass, bluefish, and tunoids push them to the surface and against beaches and structure, and vast numbers of birds also often join in the party. October blitzes, set in front of the best foliage and some of the most dramatic skies of the year, are unquestionably magnificent. At times, it even seems like there are more birds around than the currently abundant schoolie bass. 

Noah and I hit it right last week after a number of poor outings, including one where we watched a nearly mile long line of blitzing fish slowly push further and further away, fish I'd counted on to get Viktor (Landshark Outdoors) a good CT bite before he left the Northeast. That was frustrating, but on the 14th "Blitztober" lived up to its name.

We had fish all day. It was awesome. Though at times they actually averaged smaller than the predominant 2015 fish that have provided most of the action this year, there were enough of those 24" fish and some much larger fish in the mix to keep things interesting. A healthy population of anything has a great variety of fish of different ages and therefore different sizes. That isn't what we get in today's striper fishery, unfortunately, so it's a blessing to see bass from no more than 14 inches all the way up to about 40 inches.

At points, schools of bass moved up onto the white sand. At times, any time Noah and I looked into the water we saw stripers.  I could stand up in my kayak and pretty much as far as I could see... bass. The bottom was paved with stripers, all moving. I'd make a cast and as many as ten would all pile onto it. I wish I were more well equipped to document this sort of spectacle. It was unbelievable.

As the sun began to set bluefish joined the party. They were small, but it's nice to see any number around after a couple really dismal years. Up until that point it had been bass only save for a few rogue bonito. No albies at all. I'm a lot less disappointed by that the mediocre albie fishing locally this year than other fisherman. It hammers home the reality that albies aren't reliable, they never have been, and that we NEED bass for a consistent fall fishery.

Well, now it's time for me to chase the blitz again. I have a mere 20 minutes to get ready and leave today, so....

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

Foliage, Beaver Ponds, and Brook Trout

Fall in New England is a special time. It's easy enough to forget that if you've lived here for a long time. It's just so quick it can slide by before you know it. It's important to take every moment given to soak in the glory, and that does go for every season, not just fall. 

Fall Foliage

I often try to cram as much into the day as I can this time of year. Comfortable weather to be outdoors in is limited. I'll fish for a half dozen different species, hike or bike a few miles to get to an overlook, and look for herps in the same day sometimes. A few days ago I went to visit a stream I hadn't fished in more than a year, one beavers took over a while ago. I was worried for a long time they'd pose a threat to the resident brook trout, but that proved to be a faulty assumption. Sure, the big open ponds that beavers create can indeed warm a stream's waters enough to make them inhospitable to char. But that isn't always the case. Beavers and brook trout have coexisted in southern New England for millennia. I've found that more often than not, beavers and brook trout get along without too much conflict. Here's an example: a wild brookie from a CT beaver pond, on of a dozen I caught this lovely October day. A Picket Pin, stripped along just under the surface, resulted in numerous violent strikes. That fly rarely disappoints.

Funny enough, it was the ponds that produced the most fish. I caught only two in the stream itself this time. I'd have thought more fish would be staging to spawn in the creek, but it is still early. Some fish are on redds in a few places, but most haven't yet started their dance.

I should point out though that despite many of the streams I fish that beavers live on and have built a number of dams on have brook trout, finding brook trout in a beaver pond in CT is atypical. It is far more common in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I tried for a number of years to find beaver pond brookies in CT before I found some, actually just a few ridges over from this stream.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.