Podded up Wintertime Suckers

 Suckers. Just the name alone has a complete lack of glamour. Who waxes poetic about the lowly sucker? Not enough people, if you ask me. White suckers are a fabulous and difficult fish, averaging larger than most trout in Southern New England. Plenty of times an angler will hook what they think is a large trout only to be disappointed by a modestly sized sucker. Why? That 16 inch sucker just fooled you into thinking you had a 22 inch brown trout! Imagine what the 22 inch sucker will feel like.... Well, if you're very experienced you know that a sucker fights a bit differently from a trout. They twist and death roll more, and stay deeper generally.  Fighting aside, a lot of people think suckers are ugly. I tend to think describing any living organism as ugly is a very archaic and perhaps even immoral prescription. There is beauty in survival, and when I think about the form and function of any living fish I feel the same deep feeling that life is beautiful. Suckers evolved in their environment to fill a nice, and their oft-thought unappealing head and mouth structure is a remarkable work of natural art, at least to me. Different species have very different shapes, be they longnose suckers, shorthead redhorse, river redhorse, or indeed our locally abundant white suckers. And then there's their coloration and scaling. White suckers look like they've adorned thousands of tiny pennies, shining copper under a late afternoon sun. They're a lovely fish, deserving of as much respect as any other. 

They're also infinitely more interesting to angle for than are hatchery trout. So it was that I dropped my plans completely one evening while doing some mono rig practice when I came across a large school of wintering suckers in a crystal clear deep pool. These fish would not be eating as readily as the holdover rainbows I'd been catching. I promptly made some rig alterations and tried to figure out how best to present to the school. The task was made difficult by a significant amount of ice and depth between myself and the fish. I opted to fish to them from below, though it was a little further away. I went through a quick rotation of flies before deciding that the fly wasn't as much of an issue as the presentation. I schlepped on an indicator and that problem was solved. it wasn't lock an load, despite the tightly packed school. It rarely is with suckers on artificials. But I started to pick off fish on a large Hare's Ear, their takes registering as gentle double and triple ticks on the indicator. 

A couple came up fouled, a regrettable but unavoidable aspect of fishing tightly packed sucker schools. Happily though, I managed a half dozen to hand hooked squarely in the upper lip. Funny enough I did rotate through some other flies, including a mop and some tiny pheasant tails, and the preference leaned decisively to the size 10 Hare's Ear. I tend to find that if suckers are being picky smaller in better, but it wasn't in this case this time. The key, especially in the winter, is having the fly roll right along the bottom. I was accomplishing that with ease with each fly by adding and removing small shot, though the hare's ear didn't need any. That may have been the difference maker. When I've been in position to closely observe the suckers I'm presenting to I've noticed that they'll move out of the way if they feel the tipped, and with a split shot rolling ahead of the fly they're far more likely to encounter the tippet before the fly makes it to them. This can be negated by utilizing the down and across technique often employed for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead, but I'd found this results in a higher percentage of snagged fish. 

I've fished intentionally for suckers for many years now, and on many a day found myself completely unable to convert opportunities even when there were large schools of them in front of me. Back in my formative years, we'd revert to snagging them. It was silly, but as kids there was this urge to see these weird, big-ish fish out of the water and hold them. When we found them much more picky and moody than the stocked trout, sunfish, and largemouth bass we were used to, we forced our will upon them  I feel bad for doing it now, of course. But I think it somewhat speaks to the intrinsic curiosity these fish resulted in. We'd see them plastered to the river bottom in so many of the places we fished, and just had to catch them. It wasn't until I started fly fishing that I had any thought of them being undesirable. The stupid, pointless hierarchy so common in fishing- that which sticks certain species on a pedestal while considering anything else as worthless trash -almost got to me. But the child-like curiosity won out, thankfully. Those odd, big fish plastered to the river bed still capture my imagination. All that really changed is that now I know how to properly catch them. 

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