Morning Blitz

 Fall 2023 was a struggle in most of my normal striped bass haunts, and I stubbornly stuck to my guns in those places working under the incorrect assessment that if I kept going, eventually the fish had to show up. Meanwhile, friends were having much better fishing just a short bit further away from home. Not only were the encountering good stripers but big bluefish as well. I stuck to my guns on my home turf for a while before finally seeing reason and venturing out further. It was desperately necessary at that point, as I the season looked to be about to wind down.

Fall is when I basically live out of my car. Really, that could happen any time of year. But it's definitely more likely from September through November. The same clothes may not come off for days on end, the interior of the vehicle starts to smell dank and musty, and I consistently look both manic and tired. Loved ones say "you should get some rest", I say "when I'm dead". Pushing even just a little further from home and learning a relatively new to me area demands even more than the usual effort, and when a bite is in progress that means methodically fishing different structure in the new area, drawing knowledge of how similar spots in areas I already know fish at different tides, winds, and times of day. Some may require a significant number of visits at different times and tides to really dial in. I look or bait and make educated guesses as to where it may go next if it is liable to leave- always a factor in the fall -and watch for concentrations of fish eating birds or even seals. This often mean spending the majority of a week in the same general area, catching naps here and there and eating when I can and what I can between tides. But I always feel the pressure of the approaching cold season and the inevitable departure of the fish. 

On the first day of my exploratory I found a spot in daylight with very promising structure and bait activity. I made careful note of the tide level and current speed at the time of that visit and came back later that night on a different tide. There were fish feeding heavily and some very large ones in the mix. The next night, same thing but on the opposite tide. This was an ideal setup, and a spot I'd throw into the rotation for a while. Unfortunately it ended up serving up absurdly fickle fish. Though there was near constant and hellacious surface action I struggled to get bit. I tricked just a couple into taking very large Hollow Fleyes, but nothing else seemed to draw any attention and that just barely worked as it was. I fell asleep in my waders in a park and ride that night a bit dejected and frustrated but with intrigue as to the following morning. I hoped that bait might dump out into the adjacent bay and start a blitz.

The next morning, a huge blitz was in progress in a spot I couldn't get to as I drove to where the fish had been the night before. I pulled off for a bit to watch the birds dipping down to catch juvenile menhaden as stripers and blues churned the water underneath them. It was a fun show for a bit, but I wanted to feel a tight line. Things were quiet over by the mouth of the creek that had been loaded with bass the previous few nights. There were a bunch of cormorants hanging out up the beach though, and they seemed expectant. I decided to take their lead. I made some blind casts while I waited and picked up a few errant schoolies. 

It was more than an hour without much change before some of the cormorants began to take off confidently, fly across the bay, then land and swim around a point that was obscuring another small cove. Soon the whole flock- perhaps more than a hundred birds -were following their lead. I did the same. Rounding the corner, diving gulls and a few swirls marked the school. Eagerly I hopped out, dropping a camera in my waders pocket and grabbing the rod. I doubted tis would last very long and didn't expect I'd need to perform any fly changes. Twenty minutes, a dozen fish up to about 20 pounds, and a bit of sitting and basking in the chaos later the action departed and so did I. 

Short though that may have been, and utterly underwhelming compared to the blitzes the previous fall, that was the peak of my fall daytime fishing for bass. Had I adapted earlier and looked for greener grass further afield, it may have looked quite a bit different. That's how the game works sometimes though. You can get rewarded handsomely for sticking to your guns or you could miss out on the bite happening where you aren't.  

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version. 

Moments on The Fly- Log Common

 On a winding Ohio creek shaded by lush trees just beginning to get touches of fall color, I found a school of perhaps 20 carp relating to a tree that had fallen in the river. I'd walked quite a lot of this creek already, finding some redhorse here an there, catching striped shiners and smallmouth bass. This was the only place I'd see carp, and there were a lot of them there. This wasn't an atypical thing in my experience- I fairly regularly encounter isolated schools of carp in a pool or perhaps two consecutive pools on a small river in low flows with none whatsoever to be seen above or below. Sometimes these schools have just temporarily taken up shop in a spot and will only be seen there for a season, perhaps having made there way there during high water conditions. Sometimes these locations prove to consistently hold fish at all times of year. Which of the two cases this was is not known to me, as it remains the only time I'd ever fished this river. I do hope to return of course.

When I spotted the carp it was because I disturbed them a little bit. Two of the fish noticed my movements and left the log. Their retreat to deeper water wasn't especially hastily and it didn't seem to disturb the other carp there much though they did begin to move around a bit. The moment I'd noticed these fish I stopped in my tracks, very literally. Once the pair that left were out of sight I slowly adjusted from my mid-stride position to a more comfortable stance and just waited and watched as the carp that had decided to shifted and adjusted into new positions as well, taking advantage of the new room. Even if some fish are spooked or disturb in a school, an immediate shift to being a still and quiet as possible can keep the ones that weren't from taking notice. Common carp are a particularly aware and weary species and it won't always work on them. This time everything went according to plan. The fish went about their business as though I wasn't there and in time I felt comfortable enough with their behavior to try to present a fly to them. The choice of target wasn't difficult when one fish sidled out of the shadow of the log and worked its way toward me parallel to it, shopping the river bottom for morsals. It wasn't the biggest fish there but none were that big nor were there any mirrors, ghosts or any other interesting morphs I might rather catch. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth so I fed that little fish a green weenie. I'll often take a smaller feeding target over a non-feeding but bigger one so long as neither is actually that big, and none of these fish looked over 10 pounds to me. That active little common ate the weenie in textbook fashion and I lifted the rod to set the hook. Within the next few seconds there wasn't a carp in the lot that was left undisturbed. 

Though it wasn't an especially big fish, the circumstances made is a standout catch from that trip. Carp will always be a favorite of mine, big or small, and small midwestern creeks provide a backdrop to the pursuit of this species that I'm not as familiar with. Though I was looking for new species out there, the novelty of catching an old stand-by in a different setting withstood. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version. 

The Rainbow Darter, #200 On The Fly

 Darters are interesting little fish that go ignored by most anglers. Members of the family Percidae, darters share lineage with yellow perch and walleye. If you look at their morphology this isn't terribly shocking, their fin arrangement and build aren't at all dissimilar from perch, with a spikey forward dorsal and big, rounded rear dorsal. Their patterning often matches up pretty similarly too, though it is incredibly varied. Darters are extremally diverse in fact, comprising a subfamily (Etheostomatinae) made up of five genera ( Ammocrypta, Crystallaria, Etheostoma, Nothonotus, and Percina). Of these, I've caught species in two genera: Etheostoma and Percina. Though I live in an area with a notable lack of darters- Connecticut only has two species -I am a big fan of them and when the opportunity arises to target them in areas with more diversity I like to. Of course, they're often very tiny, so it can be a real challenge to get them on the fly. Percina weren't terribly hard as they're larger and a bit aggressive, so longhead darter and logperch were quite easily acquired once I fished around an abundance of each. But the Etheostoma are little bit tricky. And oh boy can that ever be both appealing and irritating. Combine their difficulty with their exceptional diversity and you've got a recipe for a hunched over, frustrated CT Fly Angler with a very sore back sneaking around shallow streams. 

And such was the position I found myself in on a clear, clean flowing mid-sized river in central Ohio this past fall. I knew this area had a number of darters that I'd not yet added to my life list, and I was having no trouble finding a bunch of different ones in the shallows. And some of them were quite ornately colored. In fact, I could already tell that one of the species represented in this spot was the rainbow darter, one of a number of species that are graced with extravagant blue, red, and orange coloration. Their name portrays their beauty, and though they are quite widespread and can be fairly numerous a lot of anglers totally skip over their existence. Brook trout, eat your heart out... if colorful, nearly gaudy elegance is your type, rainbow darters give fontinalis a serious run for their money. Fly fisherman may quickly jump to a salmonid as the prettiest freshwater fish but I struggle to pick between darters and sunfish in terms of the colorful species. 

As I slowly wandered the tail out of a run, examining the bottom carefully, I noted small aggregations of darters around clusters of rocks with vegetation growing on them there were a few species represented though I couldn't identify each. I rigged up carefully: a size 22 hair big with a tiny piece of squirmy worm material affixed to the bend of the hook (darters like something to chew on, I've noticed) and one small shot just a couple inches ahead of it on 6x tippet. Finessing a fly down in front of a tiny darter in this current would be almost akin to dropping a nymph in front of a trout in 10 feet of water in a raging, turbulent flood. It's a very tricky dance that requires precision and patience, one I was already well familiar with. 

The shot placement is a key. If you place a split shot immediately ahead of a fly, it can drop right down to the bottom nd you don't have to control two separate entities down there; the split shot and fly act as one. But some darters like attacking the shot. For some this can almost work in your favor when the fly is right at the shot, eventually they get it in the process of trying to kill the lead ball (it comical, I'm not quite sure where their infatuation with them lies). But some of the really small ones, like the ones I was seeing, my attack the shot once and be done. So I had to play an odd game of keeping the shot far enough away from the fly as not to distract the darter but close enough to have control over where on the bottom the fly settles. Closer means more control, further means less chance the darter just attacks the shot and never cares about the fly. This is, obviously, not an exact science. It requires an immense amount of trial and error. In this case about an hour of it. I had darters attack the shot, run and hide, or hit the fly but not get it in their mouths just right. Persistence pays off though and eventually I did manage to hook one. It was a diminutive but colorful little creature, my first rainbow darter. 

Lifelist fish #200: Etheostoma caeruleum, Rainbow darter. Rank: Species

Though this certainly wasn't the most impressive example to the species, it was exciting to get my first of one of the more well known colorful Etheostoma. When they spawn in the spring the mature males really color up something fierce and I'd very much like to catch one of those. But there's always another fish, isn't there? Darters are just one of a large number of whole families and genera that go largely ignored by the angling world as a while. They flee from the path of completely unaware wading anglers and scuttle for cover as our drift boats shadow the riffle bottom. I don't expect everyone to want to catch two inch long fish on hook and line, but it still surprises me that many just have no interest in learning about them at all. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version. 

Dawn on The Beach

 I pulled into a mostly empty parking lot under the cover of darkness and extremely oppressive heat. Out over the Atlantic, a cumulonimbus cloud hurled electricity into the night. It's a very foreign feeling for a New Englander to have lightning illuminate the scene while his glasses fog up upon opening the car door... it just doesn't do this sort of thing up north. Sure, there are some sticky, muggy nights in Connecticut. But not like this. I'd already adjusted and was comfortable with the heat but that didn't stop it from impressing me every time I felt it. Unfamiliarity is a good thing, and not much of this was familiar. 

Connecticut doesn't have giant turtles that lay their eggs on the beach either, and after walking down the beach a ways I was sitting 20 feet away from an enormous reptile as she did her best to ensure a future generation despite the much altered setting she was in. This was no longer just a barrier beach teaming with native life. Eastern diamondbacks had been replaced with iguanas and anoles and palmettos with resorts and multi million dollar homes.  But the loggerhead was still returning to lay her eggs, though in the morning there was a good chance a biologist riding a quad would either tape off her nest or even dig it up. Now they couldn't make it without human assistance, the cruel irony being that it was human interference that made it necessary. So, though I was a quiet observer to a natural ritual I'd always wanted to see, it was hard to be present for without becoming deeply sad. That sadness turned to aggravation as a jogger came down the beach with a bright headlamp on. Human lights at night frustrate me. I fish without one most of the time because I feel it is a gross unnecessary and a crutch when the target fish species isn't tiny minnows, madtoms and darters. And spotlighting micros is something I do less and less. A headlamp makes tunnel vision. It ruins your ability both to see when it isn't on and learn to navigate what you can't see anyway. And this jogger was on a smooth, sandy beach with no obstacles at all. I was cognizant of his presence from a half a mile away and he was not even aware enough to notice me siting just yards from his path. Nor did he notice the giant turtle that stopped chucking sand due to his light's disruption. The jogger continued down the beach to disrupt who knows how many more turtles. I stayed back as my friend made her way back down the beach. I don't think she'd finished before the jogger interrupted her process, but I wasn't interested in worsening her stress either. I stayed back and took long exposures, covering the little red light on the front of my camera with my finger as I was worried even that might be noticeable to her. She paused a few times on her way down the sand. I'm not sure she was aware I was there, but I'd like to believe she did know and just didn't mind, that she understood that I meant no harm. 

By that time the morning light was starting to come up and when the turtle had reentered the surf, I sat again to tie a slim beauty knot in the dark. The slim beauty is a good knot for connecting tippet to shocker, and I was targeting fish for which shocker was definitely warranted. My 12 weight was already tarpon ready, but I wanted to make sure my 8wt was snook appropriate as there'd been no sign of tarpon yet and I was keen to at least get something blind casting. It had been a few years since I'd caught a snook at that point, and though I'd made some attempts in the dark already by that point in the trip it was without much awareness of where and when I'd be likely to find any in that area. Almost everywhere I'd fished on this trip was new to me, as was targeting these species from the beach. I finished the knot and carefully synched it down then tied on a Clouser before leaning back again and watching the surf for the first signs of life. Before the sun crested the horizon, bait began skipping and dimpling in front of me and further out a big tarpon rolled. I adjusted my stripping basket around my waist and walked down to the water's edge to begin to cast. It wasn't long before the routine of casting, retrieving right to my feet, then casting again was interrupted by a snook eating the fly in the curl of a wave. I'd learned through my friend John Kelly that it's a good idea in some circumstances to stand back a bit to convert fish running the trough, and this payed off here. If I'd even just been getting my ankles wet I'd not have gotten a shot at this fish, but with a few feet of line sliding on sand I had enough room to fish the fly right onto the beach lip, and that's where this fish ate.  It wasn't a big snook but put up an admirable battle, jumping a few times before I subdued it. I enjoy the way snook fight- the short, zippy runs and the head and gill shaking jumps are just the sort of fight I really enjoy. 

As the sun rose further, the tarpon that were rolling off the beach a ways drew a little closer. I looked back at my 12 weight and hoped it would get an opportunity to be flexed a little. But as the daytime heat (only a little more oppressive than the nighttime heat) settled in all I had to show for my efforts were a few big ladyfish. In time, the bait activity dwindled and so did the signs of predators. The fish left and the people arrived, and my interest in casting on a crowded beach is non-existent. It was time for me to go take a nap anyway. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version. 

Traprock Brookies

 I've fished wild trout streams through all sorts of substrate and geology. Classic limestoners, freestones through limestone bedrock, marble, quartzite, granite, gneiss, schist, sandstone, brownstone, conglomerate, alluvial substrate from clay to cobble, glacial till, even muddy lake beds. But it occurred to me not long ago that I'd never caught a brookie in a stream flowing out of and through traprock bedrock. 

Traprock is a reminder of our continent's volcanic past. Millenia ago, tectonic motion let magma seep up into cracks in the Earth's crust in what is now the Mid Atlantic and Southern New England area. This magma hardened into the two kinds of rock referred to as traprock: basalt and diabase. Basalt is generally extrusive, meaning the magma cooled on the Earth's surface. Diabase typically cools below the surface. Of the two, basalt is a little more common in Connecticut. The massive, imposing mountains and ridges that run North from New Haven to Holyoke, then arc east to a terminus between Belchertown and Amherst are all volcanic remnants. Today, we drive on a lot of this, and I don't mean that our roads go over these rocky slopes. Basalt is very uniform in it's crystallization and also very hard, so it makes great aggregate for road and railroad beads, and is used in concrete and asphalt as well. Basalt is a staple of the development, industry, and infrastructure of our world whether you knew it or not. Unfortunately that means the quarrying of it has negatively impacted the species that utilize the environments that evolved around these geological features. That includes species like red cedar, blue spotted and Jefferson's salamanders, northern copperheads, red squirrel, and peregrine falcons.

Female Northern copperheads often rely on the crevices on open trap rock ridges to gestate and birth their young.

But what about brook trout? Are there any small streams on or along these traprock ridges, and do they have brook trout in them? 

The very nature of these geologic features doesn't make for an ideal situation for a coldwater stream habitat to arise. First of all, spatially they aren't huge, so there just isn't that much room. Traprock ridges are narrow and tall, their shape lends better to streams running along or between them in the sedimentary rock they intrude rather than on the dykes themselves. But there are a couple streams that emerge from them and run some distance, and they have heavy spring influence so those that aren't season seem to stay cold. 

My decision to try to catch a traprock brookie was followed by the sort of oddball research I don't often hear about other small stream anglers doing but which isn't at all unfamiliar to me. I lined up bedrock maps with topographic maps to find streams that ran not just near trap rock but through it. Then I examined some satellite imagery to get an idea of the stream's consistency. I have enough experience to tell when a mapped stream is likely to be the sort that can hold water and therefore fish year round. It also gives me an idea of the forest type and what I might be in for as far as bushwhacking. Eventually I found one that looked very promising. An added confidence booster, though it had never been sampled another in the watershed had been with brook trout, albeit very few, in the 1990's and there were no dams preventing cross pollination, if you will, between the two streams. Some culverts could throw a wrench in that. Access would suck though, with questionable parking and a long circuitous walk. When the time came though, I suited up and hit the road. 

My parking spot turned out to be legal, thankfully, but proved to be a reminder of why I got an off-road capable vehicle. I parked grabbed my rod and sling pack quickly, as I had a decent distance to walk down the road and I hate being seen with a fly rod in hand. I hustled to a bridge, not on the stream I wanted to fish but the one it flowed into. This was down in the basin, in mudstone rather that traprock. I then traversed this low gradiant creek down. There was one ominously deep pool in about a half mile of difficult to negotiate water and I hooked a brook trout there. Not only did that put a new stream on my list automatically but it gave me even more hope as the survey site at the rod I'd parked on had no brook trout in the two years it was sampled. This was likely just wintering water though. Eventually I reached my stream. I looked at my map quickly as I'd saved where it crossed the line from basalt to sedimentary bedrock on the bedrock map as my starting point. It also didn't look very favorable at the bottom end, very straight on the map and shallow in real life, but where I wanted to start there were some bends and much steeper gradient. So I hoofed it upstream, staying out of the water but stopping to fish the two decent looking runs I did see. 

Just as I reached the point I'd marked I could see a good deep, slow pool upstream. The hope was there to put this goal to bed and fast. I had on a size 12 Ausable Ugly and was fishing each pool upstream, which would work well with this one as it was blocked by brush near the head. I covered the tail- as there is often at least one fish in the tail of a pool like this in the winter -to no avail. But as I extended my cast the water I was fishing held promise in the for of exceptional depth. I let the fly fall and there was a discernable but delicate tap. The next cast in the same spot I was ready and the fish was on. Success! The fish was diminutive and far from the most colorful example of her species, but that was all I'd needed. I continued upward and caught one more fish and missed some others, all very small, and decided to bother them no more. The day had been a fantastic one already.

 Though this may seem like an extremely trivial goal to have achieved and perhaps an unnecessary one for just a couple tiny brook trout, I think many anglers miss some significant keys to the understanding of fish and fisheries. Frankly I'll be blunt... I've only twice been legitimately impressed by the comprehensiveness of understanding an individual trout angler had of not only wild trout but the totality of their habitat, movement, behavioral patterns, and the nature of their whole lives. The geology of the land and rivers plays a HUGE roll in how trout survive, grow, and behave and it is one of the foremost factors I look at to understand a stream and what potential it has. And though I may only very rarely fish traprock trout, it is a piece of the puzzle and another step toward my end goal of having the most thorough understanding of the natural world I can. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, and Sammy for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.