Monster Carp on The Fly at Night

 Quick reminder: I'm doing a talk this coming Thursday, August 11th, at 7:00pm at the Middle Haddam Library on fly fishing for Connecticut River Carp. It should run about an hour, I hope to see some of you there!

The Hex hatch is a CT summer featurette. It's tough to pinpoint, devilishly so, and doesn't last. If the conditions aren't just so there often aren't even that many fish feeding on it. When it does come together though, wow is it ever magical. The water boils with a multitude of fish species frenzying on the huge mayflies. This year, so far as I do occasionally run into later August hatches, the fishing has been average, which is to say an exciting experience but not one that resulted in a significant number of notable catches. Last year was subpar but one night yielded giant crappies slurping spinners, which was just incredible. This year it was mostly average sized white perch and smallmouth bass making up my catch each night. With one exception. 

I always linger after the hatch, especially early in the event. If it's marginal, the nymphs will often swim for a little while after the ones that are going to emerge do so. It's slower, slightly less exciting fishing but It has produced some of the larger fish. One night, I was standing under a streetlight casting  Pat's Rubber Legs- an un-ideal but passable hex nymph imitation -when a shadowy form emerged from the depths into the lit area. It was a carp, a decent sized one at that. I let it approach then presented my fly to it. It moved forward and flaired its lips, so I set. I was into something solid. Too solid, I thought, it felt snagged. I started to attempt to detach the fly, knowing full well the carp was going to spook off. It left fairly passively, which was odd. Suddenly, line was coming out of my had. "Oh, she is on" I muttered aloud. The fish left with patient autority, buckling my 5wt but in no real rush. I knew it was big, though at that point I wasn't quite sure just how big. 

Yeah, uhhh... she was huge. She was actually tough to lift. I've only had that issue with a small handful of carp. I suppose the takeaway here isn't extremely clear, so in case that's true: keep fishing. You can't always predict when a trophy fish is going to present itself. Some are a result of fishing hard, planning, predicting... and then others just sorta happen. In either case, you can't be sitting at home. Fish when you can, always. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, and Jake 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.

Hex Hatch & Other Updates

 There's currently an exceptional hex hatch happening in the evening on one of the rivers I guide. It's an exceptional opportunity to get large warm-water fish on dries, an opportunity most CT fly anglers never experience, and I've got the right vessel and gear for it. The window is short, I expect little more than the next 4 nights. If you'd like to try this, it's a short two hour trip that I'd run at a discount, so reach out soon if you've got a free evening and want to try something extremely unique! If the hatch doesn't happen there's generally still very good fishing. Channel catfish, huge carp, mega white perch, and large bass are all eating the hex. This isn't something you'll get from any other guide in CT. 

In other news, Noah and I have started doing weekly report for The Fisherman, specifically about the more odd and off-the wall bites that are happening. Subscribe on Youtube to catch our take on what's happening each week. 

Last but not least, on Thursday, August 11th I'll be doing a talk at the Middle Haddam Public Library at 7:00pm, entitled CT's World Class Carp & How to Catch Them on The Fly. It'll cover the history of carp in CT, how I go about targeting them on the fly, and their impacts on the CT River ecosystem. I hope to see you all there! 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, and Jake 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.

You Put a Hex on Me

Hexegenia limbata. It might be the most well known Latin name for a bug among those that tempt trout with the fly in the Eastern United States. That's in part because, like some other species, it doesn't really have a wide spread name. There's "giant Michigan mayfly", and the hatches on Michigan's famous trout streams, which were tailor made for this silt and mud loving insect, are legendary. But they occur in far more places than Michigan. So most call these bugs Hexegenia, or just Hex for short.
Also owing to their fame is the gigantic size of these mayflies. When bunches of Hex duns drift on the surface, even fish of epic proportion take notice. Very few other hatches can draw even mostly piscivorous fish's attention like the hex, not in this part of the world. And though their fame lies in the places where both trout and Hexegenia habitat overlap, these bugs draw fish of all sorts to the surface, and most Hex habitat isn't trout habitat. These are after all a slow water, muddy bottom mayfly, and throughout much of their range that means they're in water too warm to hold trout year round. Id encountered Hexegenia in CT a handful of times over the years, and mostly it was a good hatch to catch smallmouth during. Then, one night in late July I stumbled upon an extremely heavy hex hatch in mixed-species water, bringing basically every fish to the surface. I had nothing remotely appropriate that first night and got totally skunked. But I became obsessed with this particular hatch and ended up fishing it night after night, into the first week of August. For about an hour and a half to two hours after sunset each evening the river literally boiled with fish feeding on giant mayflies. Bluegill, rock bass, white perch, yellow perch, largemouth and smallmouth bass, channel catfish, common carp, bullheads, walleye... everyone had joined the party. The sound was like no other... I've heard vastly more loud feeding frenzies, but never anything this loud and sustained and on an insect emergence. Unfortunately it was also such a blanket hatch that it was tricky fishing. It wasn't easy to target fish because they were cruising at random. There were so many bugs that it was also genuinely impossible at times to tell which was my fly. And of course the fish had a lot of targets to choose from. When I did catch fish, it was mostly white perch. This is something I wont complain about, catching white perch on dry flies is not a normal occurrence, and some of these were frankly huge.

On the third night I hit the hatch, I hooked a very large channel catfsh. It ate almost at my feet, and in the dim glow of the street I could see the whole fish. It may have been as big as 15lbs. And it was up and gulping these bugs. My heart was about beating out of my chest when I set the hook and it tore off. This was not a 5wt appropriate fish. When the line went slack and my fly came back with the hook point broken off, I almost cried. Unfortunately that was the only very large and unusual fish I got a chance at during this hatch, though I also had a near 30lb carp swim up and gulp a cluster of Hex right in front of me, and saw a giant walleye one night do the same.

Towards the end of the hatch, when it was actually a mix of duns and spinners, I figured out that fishing from the opposite bank I had been was wildly more effective. This may seem strange, it turned out having that one streetlight in front of me rather than behind me let me actually see my fly, and I now also had a better angle to the current and could feel when fish ate the fly submerged. Unfortunately I then only had one more night of heavy feeding on the giant mayflies. But that was at least good for the only bass and by far the largest white perch. And too me that was satisfaction enough. I do want to catch some of the more wild fish that I saw taking advantage during this hatch next year, but just being there each night to see one of the biggest combined fish and insect biomasses I'd ever been witness to was memorable.

There really is nothing quite like the Hex. Those giant ephemeral bugs, so large yet so weightless in my hand, drying and flapping their hands all over the surface of that river... with the pops, boils and splashes of hundreds upon hundreds of fish ringing through the night air. What a remarkable natural event.
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, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Search for the Elusive Blueback Trout (Pt. 2)

After my brief morning jaunt alone, Noah and I set back out after having some breakfast to explore a bit more of these lakes. We had just barely scratched the surface of these waters on our first afternoon, but we certainly had made progress.

We made more progress on day two, at least in terms of catching fish. We found Hexegenia emerging over most of the larger mud and sand flats, and brook trout and yellow perch eating them. Though I might have caught a fish or two on dries, I was rigged with a heavy sink tip and a small silver Kreelex was working... like, really well. So I kept doing that. Many fish took on the ascent, which told me they were likely keyed on emerging and swimming nymphs more so than duns. The Kreelex is also a wicked bright fly. Those fish could see it from a long way off, so I think it may have been better than, say, a dull hex nymph. Since I was using a tip with such a rapid fall rate, my line bowed significantly and my take to hookup ratio was not exactly ideal. I missed a lot of fish. But I caught a lot of fish too, and I don't know for sure if I would have had I fished a floater or slower sinking line. When I trolled, which was every time I re-set my drift, I hooked every fish that took. But trolling isn't particularly fun so I didn't devolve to just trolling. 

The fish weren't particularly large. Some got comfortably into the low-mid teens. These were classic wild Maine stillwater brook trout though, something I've not done a whole lot of, so it was fun. I didn't photograph more than two of them, which I somewhat regret because not only did I not photograph most of the biggest ones, but somewhat don't because honestly, as brook trout go, these were pretty dull. 

We caught a fair number of yellow perch, which, if big enough to be worth the effort, came back with us for dinner. We ended up with a pretty good meal, though we could easily have taken more and probably should have some days. The fresh meat is very much worth the minimal effort it takes to obtain in this wilderness. We left the bigger lakes pretty early after being beat down by wind for a few hours. We spent most of the rest of the second afternoon not fishing for salmonids, actually, though we did go back out in the evening. It didn't really produce much though. We got some new species right by camp, which did keep things feeling productive. A weather change was coming. It rained a bit overnight, and the east wind that had persisted since we got out switched to a west wind. I wasn't sure how it would effect the fishing, but we were on to our third day and I knew we needed to make stuff happen if we wanted to catch a blueback. We decided to cover new ground even further from camp, but still on the connected lakes. Basically, we continued to find fish in the same sorts of places we had the days before, but not in the exact same places. Given that the fishing in the lakes was pretty slow now, we spent as much time exploring as we did just focusing on fishing. Our surroundings were far more grand than the fishing was at that time. So, naturally, we wandered. And wondered.

Eating peanut butter off an ultralite

We ended that session with a handful of brook trout and perch each, and realized we really ought to make a somewhat more drastic move, leaving these connected, easier to access ponds for greener horizons. 

Until next time.
Fish for the love of fish.
Fish for the love of places fish live.
Fish for you.

 If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.