I'm totally infatuated with giant fallfish. I'd love to say that I have a few water bodies close to home where I can consistently catch fallfish north of a foot long, but this just doesn't happen around here. There are some fish of that caliber, but not many. This is in contrast to other parts of the Northeast where fallfish in excess of a foot really aren't that uncommon. For me, looking for an impressive fallfish is a needle-in-a-haystack type pursuit.
last week I devoted quite a bit of time to a stream I've caught some of my biggest local fallfish in. It isn't a large stream but during the spawning season, big fallfish enter it from the river it flows into. The spawn was in full swing when I visited, and it was difficult to pick fish out of the schools. When I caught males, they were colored up and their heads were covered in tubercles. When I caught females, they were full of eggs.
I worked both up and downriver hoping to find some dense schools with a few large ones mixed in, but the pickings were slim. I ended up covering more water than I intended, and catching a few unintended species. Stocked brown and rainbow trout were a disappointing find, and I got about a dozen of them.
At the very uppermost point that most fish migrating from downriver can reach, there was a really deep hole. Salmonid species and perhaps white suckers could perhaps pass the plunges about the pool, but most fish are stopped. Every year I get a few small smallmouth and largemouth bass in that pool, but on this trip my indicator was sunk by a smallmouth that was every bit of 4 1/2 pounds! Unfortunately, the hook pulled. That certainly would have been the fish of the day. As I walked back downriver, the sun came out and it started and I went to look for rattlesnakes. The cloud cover rolled right back over and it cooled off again. I saw timbers, but had no good photo opportunities. It was just one of those days where nothing was going quite right. Hopefully I'll be able to get on some monster fallfish at a later date.
Until next time,
I'm also a fallfish fan. My local stream (Middlesex County, Ma.) is a marginal stream, stocked with trout in the spring, but they cannot survive as holdovers (too warm). But it does have a native population of fallfish. Last year, probably due to covid shutdown and trout stocking happening at the same time, everyone fished and there were no trout left. But I continued to fish and caught some big fallfish in the spring, including big Red males with acne (tubercles). As the season progressed, I continued to fish and targeted the fallfish (no trout). After spawning I caught a lot of small to medium fallfish, but the big fish disappeared. This is a stream that essentially dries up below a single big pool. Can't imagine where they could migrate too, unless they were there and I couldn't catch them? They readily flies and will take dry flies and can be pretty wily sometimes. So Fallfish saved my covid fishing season. This year, less fisherman, more trout and fewer fallfish. But other years have had trout and fallfish together. So I've been wanting to learn more about this fish and its habitat and habits.
ReplyDeleteI've seen a similar phenomenon around here in the winter. Fallfish seem to completely vanish from streams they were present in abundance in just months before and yet in other streams I have no problem finding them.
DeleteThey are a cool species for darn sure. A major river behind my house here (Nashua River) has a surprising population and some are really big - like 13-15" I'd ball park. They fight well and like Suckers are underrated by many.
ReplyDeleteVery cool to see threads like this that remind me how many amazing NATIVE fish we have around.
I am also very interested in them--but especially because I caught one --- one! -- good sized one some years ago. It was a Grey Ghost Gulper!
ReplyDeleteSomewhere on my blog here on blogspot I have a short clip of it squirming out of my hand--very muscular.
I don't catch fallfish in most of the streams that I fish. Is there a key feature that makes a stream suitable for them over other species?
ReplyDelete