Autumn Bubblers: Fall Carp on the Fly

 Fall is one of my favorite times of year to target carp. They often put on the feed bag during any autumn warm spell, bulking up before the cooling waters slow their metabolic processes, and it can be a time of high rewards. It can also be a time of difficulty, especially if an angler is looking for fish to act like they were earlier in the season. They often don't. Shallow feeding becomes rather infrequent; carp are much more likely to be feeding on deeper mud flats. Subsequently, with the long shadows of the shortening day, fall doesn't lend itself to sight casting to visibly feeding fish as often as spring and summer. But that doesn't mean we need to slow twitch flies on the bottom hoping a carp finds it by chance. A convenient natural phenomena and the basic feeding behavior of common carp allow the observant fisherman to see carp they can't actually see. I put this to use one day after work this October.

I started the afternoon on a pond that has some true monster carp in it, but is also loaded with bass. I worked my way around the bank casting a woolly bugger, slow stripping it, pulling up chunky little largemouth after chunky little largemouth, waiting to see the telltale sign that a carp was feeding in the water in front of me. Unfortunately I never really saw it at that pond, but the dink largemouth quota was satisfied by the time I'd made my way around to where I'd started.

I then moved along to a creek up the road, a spot I don't think I've ever visited without seeing evidence of carp feeding. It's a heavily altered body of water, not a natural state freestone stream at all. It has man-made pools along it's length, and in these deep pools some carp winter over. These deep holes have big deep mud flats full of settled detritus, dragon fly nymphs, and crayfish. Carp feed on these flats in the fall and winter, and it's the ideal scenario for seeing fish you can't actually see. 

What I mean by this is seeing the reel time signifiers that a carp is rooting in the bottom. This is something I've written about before, but I do think its worth a refresher. Decomposition of organic matter on the bottom of lakes, ponds, and streams creates nitrogen gas, which gets trapped in little pockets in the muck. As a bottom feeding fish like a carp or catfish roots around, digging out macro invertebrates, vegetation, or dead organisms, it liberates these bubbles of nitrogen and they rise to the surface in a steady stream. It takes experience to discern between the natural release of gasses that isn't caused by a living creature moving around, turtles mucking on the bottom, and carp. With time on the water it becomes second nature. It then takes more time to learn to read what the bubbles mean as far as the fish's behavior. That's the biggest problem with this type of fishing: knowing where the fish is facing and getting a fly close enough that it can see it. Sometimes a bubbler has a clear path of travel, sometimes it wanders aimlessly, sometimes it sits in a spot for a while then hops over 10 feet before digging in again. This deviant behavior is compounded by the fact that a fly doesn't simply sink straight down to the bottom from where it hits the water. It gets effected by current, the leader, the fly line, it's own shape and weight balancing...  it's very complex. Really you need to make quite a lot of experimental casts at bubbling carp to get in front of the fish. I've been doing this for years and I still don't know what I'm doing. That said, even a blind squirrel can find a nut... or the smaller nut eating the big nut's leftovers.

A common repercussion of casting at feeding carp is catching other fish that are looking to feed on anything the carp may kick up. I've caught lots of smallmouth, largemouth, perch, and sunfish in this scenario but this was the first time I'd caught a fallfish. It was nice to get a native fish out of this highly altered water. Both fallfish and white suckers use this waterway, and their niches overlap some with carp. I'm glad it seems the carp aren't impacting their populations much. 

As often happens the carp the fallfish was following spooked when I hooked it's little buddy. Fortunately there were plenty more bubblers to cast to and eventually I got my woolly bugger in exactly the right spot. I'd led the bubbler quite a bit and gave the fly one little hop when it looked like the fish had lifted its head (the bubbles subsided briefly). The take was very committed, and not at all subtle. I just abruptly came tight and the fish was peeling line. It wasn't big but I'll take any carp, any way, any time.

Bubblers aren't easy. I pulled that carp out of about four feet of water just making educated guesses at it's position and direction of travel. So though I couldn't buy another carp that evening despite plenty being around, I was more than happy to have caught that one.

As we roll on into winter, bubbling will become pretty much the only way to locate carp in most waters. If you're ate up with carp on the fly like I am, I'd say it's probably worth practicing fishing to the ones you can't actually see... even though it's the opposite of the shallow tailers that got most of us into the game.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon

One Foggy Thanksgiving Night

 One foggy and warm Thanksgiving eve four years ago, I caught a gorgeous walleye on a spur of the moment outing. Unlike my Christmas Eve tradition, which was started from a similar spontaneous outing and a monstrous small stream wild brown trout, I didn't decide to make this a yearly trip. But when I glanced outside on Thursday night to see my street bathed in fog I couldn't resist. I rigged my spey rod, and though the conditions were poor to horrible for night trout fishing I set out into the mist to swing large streamers in the black waters of my nearest trout river big enough for such pursuits.

In the eerie and quiet desolation I cast and pondered, allowing my black and blue Intruder to dance the current breaks and look enticing enough to tempt whatever trout may be slightly active. Maybe. Probably not.

Passive tactics allow for contemplation. Thanksgiving has never been a huge favorite holiday of mine, for a variety of reasons personal and ethical. But that's not to distract from the importance of gratitude. And as I stood there in frigid water, waders leaking, waiting for a grab that would never come, I smiled. I'm one lucky bastard. 

This has been an awful year, but I'd recon you've all still got something to smile about. So go stand in your favorite river or lake or ocean and smile about it. 

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.

Critical Factors: Fall Run Stripers

Reading signs is key to any fishing. Observation skills are the most important tool in my arsenal for finding and catching fish. The subtle signs of the presence of bait, the way wind works around a wood point, the contour of a shoreline... these things all matter. Some level of intuitiveness is equally necessary, as it isn't always obvious what fish will do in relation to a change in condition or in relation to structure. Bonito may feed heavily in the rip at the end of a point on one tide, or may cycle in a lazy eddy outside the rip on the opposite tide. Smallmouth bass may favor the windward or leeward side of a boulder on a reef in a lake depending on minute variables I've yet to decipher. Trout seem to feed well on a midnight full moon in the winter, but such nights see a big decline in activity in the summer. The intuition based on observations comes with time for some and for others it never happens. For a precious few people, it is ingrained. Some people are born looking at the natural world, with innate curiosity and a drive to understand it. For those of us who sat intensely watching bugs go about their business before we were even verbal -children whose curiosity wasn't broken down by parents and teachers but instead encouraged- observing and attempting to decipher the behavior of wildlife is second nature. Whether learned or ingrained, vigorous observation is what separates the casual angler from the obsessive. 

 

Two consecutive nights in my October striper tear highlighted just how crucial being observant and detail oriented can be. The first of the two was the best of the lot. The second, which followed the same basic itinerary, showed just how much a single condition change can alter the fishing. 

 

October 8th, 2020: Partly cloudy, Northwesterly wind, dropping tide.

 

Before sunset the wind had schools of peanut bunker that may otherwise have been wandering the middle of the shallow cove shoved up against the southeast bank. This was a rip-rap edge and the deepest part of the cove where a bridge channel creates a big eddy and a small eddy on the incoming; these eddy swirls have dictated the structure. Bass hold in the deep holes on either side of the bridge daily and feed opportunistically unless a large volume of bait is present, as in the case of these peanuts. The bass were blitzing on them this evening and following a patternable cycle, as well as holding on the channel edges. They responded well to attractor flies, be it a Gamechanger or large Snake Flies. I find these flies more effective than imitative patterns when sparse bass are feeding on thick schools of peanuts, as well as more likely to pull bigger fish out of the fray. None of these bass were large, but they weren't tiny either. The average size was somewhere between 26 and 27 inches and there wasn't much variance.

 

As darkness fell the blitzing ceased, as is often the case, and I eked a few more fish off the channel edge before deciding to move to the outer bridge, which unlike the inner bridge, was lit. It is not an uncommon occurrence for me to encounter a forage preference switch between daylight and night, and with schoolies and slot sized stripers a common switch is from juvenile menhaden to silversides. The abundance of eel grass in the area I was fishing made it a silverside magnet, and silver sides are attracted to artificial light at night. As day progressed to night, silversides vacated the shelter of the vegetation and congregated in huge numbers around the lit bridge and along the beach either side of it. I knew I could pick off fish under the bridge, and I did, but they were not easy or consistent. Though there were fewer bass along the beach, a slow and steady retrieve with a small flatwing produced fish. By the time I felt satisfied and like I wasn't going to miss anything, I'd caught and released 25 striped bass. 

 

October 9th, 2020: Mostly clear, Southeasterly wind, dropping tide. 

 

Noah tagged along this time. The wind change had moved the peanuts and as a result, the bass that were still present at the inner bridge were in an opportunistic but resting mode rather than in active pursuit of bait. We caught fish sporadically until sunset, and when, as had been the case the night before, the activity turned toward silversides, I decided that instead of moving to the outer bridge immediately we ought to follow the pattern of fishing away from the bridge. Up the rip rap bank to the west of the bridge a few fish were feeding, and Noah and I both picked off a few more there and each missed larger ones before leaving. Though there were less silversides because it wasn't lit like the outer bridge, the bait and predators were still following the same basic pattern as it related to depth, and some were leaving the channel and moving into the adjacent shallows. I suspect that following this pattern could produce some very large bass for me in the future. 

 

At the outter bridge, the pattern was not wind dictated and it fished no differently than it had the prior night, so I didn't want to spend as much time there. We headed to another place that I hadn't been hitting at all, where we found a few smaller bass to close out the trip. There, I also caught fish away from the bridge channel.

 

The most important thing I take away from two such nights is that different patterns can be repeatable across different conditions and locations, but there are common threads. Wind direction is important. Type of structure is important. Tide is important. Everything could be important. It is up to the angler to figure out the rules of the game. 

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.

Salmon River Salmon and Steelhead: Becoming a Snob

Lake Ontario's native Atlantic salmon went extinct in the 1800's, for much the same reasons salmon all over the East Coast were suffering: dams, pollution, and overfishing. As seems to be human nature given just about any and all similar cases turn out the same, those in charge of such things immediately started trying to replace those Atlantics with something different. These attempts included the first stockings of Pacific salmon in Lake Ontario. These early attempts to establish cohos and chinooks failed, but hope was never truly lost, and when the extirpation of lake trout in the middle of the 20th century resulted in a huge boom and overpopulation of alewives the stockings again commenced. By 1974 a run had been established in New York's Salmon River. 

The early years of this fishery were, to put it politely, an absolute shit-show. People didn't believe the fish would voluntarily take a lure or bait, so they deliberately snagged them. Though already illegal and widely considered unfair chase on most waters, it remained common practice on Lake Ontario tributaries where salmon runs occurred until 1995. Fear of economic impacts to the now wildly popular fisheries was surpassed by the overwhelmingly obvious problems with such an unethical practice. Illegal activity, fist fights, harvesting salmon eggs for profit, and other such behavior were rampant. The snagging ban inevitably did cause a decrease in fishing effort but over time, as people discovered that the fish could indeed be caught on flies and bait if targeted the right way, it once again boomed. It is estimated that $201,000,000 is spent by anglers fishing the Salmon River annually. And though things have gotten more civilized, there is still a lot of buffoonery. My friend Rick invited me and fellow fish head Charlie to join him on a trip during the peak of the salmon run. We'd spend one day fishing the public water and two on the private Douglaston Salmon Run, giving us the chance to see both the chaotic and the more civilized side of this fishery. 

When Rick and I went to fish winter steelhead, we'd stayed well upriver, in and around Altmar. This time the idea was to fish further down where the fish were freshest. Not far above the Douglaston, Town Pool is one of the first holding spots above the private water. We just wanted to watch there, as this spot is rarely anything less than pure chaos. It was a fun show to watch, though I'm certainly not the type to want to take part in this sort of fishing. Fish were snagged, lines were crossed, and it was the furthest thing from socially distant. But the behemoth fish we could see in the waters below shed light on why it was this way. For most of these people, chances to catch fish of this size (in a small river no less) don't come that often and the allure surpasses the rest of the experiences that would make someone like myself turn their nose up to it. 

Snobbery, or some semblance of it, had already set in. 

We drove around a bit before settling in to fish at Pineville. I was eager to do some wandering and walk to try to get away from crowds. It turned out that this was possible, but it wasn't easy to find water that had both fish and less people. I know I never found any water that had both some fish and no people. But I did find some and less, and that seems to be about the best you can do.

My expectation were low that first day, but I tried a bit of everything some swinging big flies with my spey setup to nymphing and dredging eggs to sight fishing with small streamers. I hooked one fish while sight fishing, and it wasn't the one I was targeting but the more beat up individual it was next to. It made an unexpected move and I suddenly found myself attached to it by the dorsal fin. Try as I might, I couldn't roll cast the fly off of it, but the fish was fresh enough to put up a solid fight so I decided to use this as an opportunity to decipher the limitations of my tackle against these fish. I put as much pressure on the fish as I was willing to plucked my woolly bugger out as soon as it got close enough. From then on I decided to break fish off that were clearly snagged. 

When I made it back to where Rick and Charlie were, Rick was hooked up. I stood on the bridge to watch and shoot photos. Eventually the fish came unpinned, unfortunately, and by that time we were hungry and decided to head out

We got a pizza at Paulanjo's in Pulaski than headed to the hotel and eked out what precious little sleep we could. In the morning, we went to the Douglaston. After New York senator Doug Barclay got sick of fisherman trespassing and behaving despicably, on his large property on the lower reaches of the Salmon River, he turned his property into a private, regulated fishery. Anglers who are willing to can pay for the privilege of smaller crowds and better behavior on prime water under the watchful eye of the Douglaston's river keepers, who make sure everything is on the up n' up. 

I very quickly came to the conclusion that I'd never fish the public water on the Salmon during the mid fall season again. Yet another level of snobbery had been reached.

Rick and Charlie decided to settle in at one of the major pools, but the wandering itch was bugging me and wander I did. I spent some time in the riffles trying to get some chinooks holding in the pockets to react to flies, but I inevitably found my camera better at capturing these fish than my fly rods.

I wandered my way downriver before settling in to fish hard in a stretch that looked good but wasn't especially busy. I started out bouncing heavy flies, doing what basically everyone else was doing, and kept doing that for a while, through a couple missed fish and a couple intentional break-offs of fouled fish. As the day wore on though I began to bore of it. In time the pool cleared out nearly entirely, and I switched to the spey rod, started at the head, and began to cast and swing. 

10 casts in, my intruder got smoked. I swung and whiffed, and a chrome steelhead did one cartwheel in retaliation. I swore under my breath and my arms fell to my sides. That I had not expected, not so soon. That moment right there sold me completely. I was swinging for the rest of the trip. I felt affirmed half an hour later when a big dark king smoked my weird olive and purple fly and put up an admirable fight. It was my first chinook, my first Lake Ontario salmon, and my first salmonid approaching 20 pounds. 

Lifelist fish #178: Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. Rank Species

I had a couple more wonderful experiences with chinooks that day and the following. Very few of them ended with a fish to hand. The largest fish I hooked took a big yellow Gartside softackle streamer around sunset and was likely in the 40lb class. It roared off, leaving the run I hooked it in, the leaving the pool below it, then entering the next long run below that before turning, jumping, landing on my leader, and breaking off. I felt pretty under-gunned with my 11'6" 8wt. The next day a fish of similar size gave me the same sort of battle but this time I landed, unfortunately it turned out to be hooked outside the mouth, so though it was a gorgeous quite fresh beast of a fish I didn't photograph it. The first fish I'd hooked that day was also the same sort of gigantic male, but not on for very long and did definitely eat the fly, a huge pink marabou spey fly. After doing some crazy frantic runs; charging up, down, across and back but never for than 30 feet; it launched completely out of the water sideways and threw the fly. The image of a 35-40lb chinook two feet above the river, spray sparkling like shards of glass haloing it, and my fly falling out of its big toothy maw will forever be burned in my brain. 

Later on the second day I got the freshest king I'd been able to land. He was a little fellow, and almost fooled me into thinking he was a big brown trout. It was a pretty cool fish nonetheless. 

The fish that made the trip for me though came in the first evening on the Douglaston. I was working a bend very thoroughly, trying to drive one of the big kings or cohos I'd seen in there crazy to the point of snapping at my irritating white and grizzly swing fly. That didn't happen. Instead, my fly got crushed at the end of the swing, and a silver bullet came flying out of the water when I set the hook. It was a steelhead, a chrome psychopath, and it came upstream and went right by me spending more time in the air than in the water. My heart was pounding. The rest of the fight was pretty much a blur but I do know I was utterly floored by how hard this fish was fighting for its size. By some miracle, I got it to hand, and couldn't stop uttering expletives under my breath. This was my first fresh steelhead, my first steelhead on a streamer, and my first on the swing. It completed my transition to snobbery. My days of nymphs, split shot, and dredging up Great Lakes salmon and steelhead are probably over. It had never sat well with me anyway, I gravitated towards spey fishing in the same way I was drawn to fishing for Atlantic salmon and sea run trout with traditional flies and methods. It felt like it did the fish justice, as if the fish were made for the methods instead of the other way around. 

I'd never be so bold as to suggest superiority, I don't care how you catch your salmon and steelhead so long as it falls within the bounds of what is legal and fair-chase. Bait, center pinning, chuck and duck... they're all completely valid and ethical when done right. But for me, I can nymph trout, fallfish, bass, suckers, and other such species. I would like to swing my flies without additional weight for my migratory fish. It just feels right to me. That was my takeaway from this trip. I became a spey snob. I can't wait to make a steelhead trip and swing flies for hours upon hours for scant few 

takes. I really can't.

Rick with a big hen chinook that took an egg.

It took much too long for me to experience the Pulaski salmon run. It's such a huge part of Northeast fishing culture that one can't can't live here, be serious about fishing, and get away without making the trip at least once. There wasn't anyone I'd rather have taken the trip with than Rick. Though Charlie and I had never been, Rick has a long history with this fishery. He knows it well, he's seen it morph and change a bit over the years, and he's caught a lot of salmon and steelhead there. Charlie was also great company. I'm sure the three of us will fish the Salmon River again sometime, Covid willing.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.

On Our Way Home (Western PA Pt. 8)

 Three intrepid multispecies anglers sat on a ledge above the Allegheny river, in the dark waiting for one of their rods to bend under the weight of an angry flathead catfish that never materialized. Jake, Noah and I had struggled this trip to accomplish a lot of our goals, the first and and biggest, incidentally, being getting to Ohio in the first place. All the big lifer goals evaded us, and this last ditch effort for a flathead was our final stand. And when that failed we resorted to throwing a large rock over the railing like idiots. 

This will stand out as one of the funniest moments of the year. Noah hoisted the rock up to the railing then heaved it over... then leaned and looked right down. The small boulder's impact and plunge into the river left a momentary void that the water quickly filled to and then beyond capacity, sending a plume of water straight up into Noah's face.Jake and I cackled with laughter, and Noah did too. It was a fitting end to our fishing together on this trip. We headed back to my Grandparents' and slept well in the camper, then left to fish a few more spots in the morning after breakfast.

 We barely made it beyond the end of the drive; Jake had a flat. He assured us he'd be fine and we shouldn't wait around with him, so we said our goodbyes and Noah and I pointed the van east. We'd fish our way home, but our goals were now set to a simpler standard. We just wanted to catch some smallmouth an fallfish before we got home. Some time later we found ourselves on the Juniata River, for the first time in days on a watershed where fallfish were the dominant Semotilus species.

We waded and fished light gear, prospecting the water, catching little smallmouth an bunches of fallfish. It was beautiful water and enjoyable fishing.

As with most smallmouth or fallfish rivers I've fished over my career, I found one particular nondescript but shaded bit of shoreline that was just loaded with fish. I haven't quite cracked the code yet, because the line is thin between what makes these hot spots so hot. The shade is key of course, but something else is very important and I'm not quite sure what it is. Depth? Contour? Current speed? Substrate? I will eventually crack that code, but it may take some serious experimentation and research.

As we fished our way up, Noah soon outpaced me in both numbers and size of smallmouth. Though none of them were at all impressive in stature, as smallmouth anywhere are they were full of rage and willing to battle to the end. 

As we reached the limit of where we wanted to fish upriver, an out of use bridge loomed and we couldn't resist using it to cross back to the road we'd parked on. Well, and also as a sight fishing opportunity. 

We thanked the Juniata for the fish and headed further eastward to bigger, more famous smallmouth water. I'e wanted to fish he Susquehanna for years. To put it simply, it was big, it was intimidating, and we didn't catch a thing. I can' wait to fish it again NOT on foot. We found a fishy but questionable spot, saw a couple carp, didn't get so much as a bump, found a creepy doll, and were absolutely baffled at how this place could on any day no produce a single fish.

Pennsylvania beat us down, shook us around, and hung us out to dry. Pennsylvania made us work. We probably did the best we could. We caught new native fish from the bizarre to the beautiful. Though nothing went as planned, this was a trip I won't soon forget. Noah and I thrive under minimal preparation, we just go to a place, fish hard, and more often than not we do quite well. In my opinion this trip was no exception, we caught a lot of fish and added to our lifelists in a big way. It was good to have Jake with us. I think we made a pretty good team, the three of us. I can't wait to team up on another mission. Do me a favor, follow Jake on Instagram, @barbelloudoorsecology, and subscribe to his YouTube channel. 

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.