Take A Moment

 A little while ago I was on my way to a fishing spot when I came upon this incredible flock of swallows. Despite having just felt an urgent need to get out on the water as quickly as possible I suddenly was compelled to stay right where I was and just watch the show. I pulled off the road, got out, climbed up onto the roof, and sat for a while watching something miraculous. 

Remember to take a moment the next time you're out fishing. Lean the rod up, take off your sling pack off for a moment, and watch something cool happen without interrupting it. Every day I'm out something wild happens, I just don't always pause to take it in. I ought to.

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, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah 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.

Quality Bass in Sloppy Weather

I met Andrew at the launch early one morning expecting to have a decent shot at finding some tunny without having to go very far, which would be a good thing considering the impending east wind. The waters would be rough that day and we wouldn't find a darned thing close to our chosen launch. This was particularly disappointing since we did find fish very close to another launch that we could just as easily have used. 

Some days I predict things well, some days I don't. This was one of those days where I could have planned things out much better for us and had us on good sized stripers earlier and longer. But perhaps I should take the fact that we got on them at all as a significant positive. We worked our way steadily west from where we launched, finding clouds of bait that weren't being touched at all, before pulling alongside a mud flat and watching a nice bass smash and adult bunker just 70 feet away. I quickly pulled out the big flies and we went at it. I lost the first fish I hooked, which is a bummer because it was almost certainly in the 40 inch class. We had no time to feel dejected though, because we then had a little window of time where it was a hit every cast, and most of the fish were really good ones. 

There's an old saying: "wind from the east, fish bite least."

On this day that didn't seem to be true. With a howling east wind we had bass cartwheeling over flies for a good little while. I could barely get a white Popovics Beast Fleye in the water before a slot sized bass was on top of it. It was exceptionally good, fast fishing. 

I find that slot sized stripers feeding on or around big bunker are much, much easier to get on the fly than very large bass, which have a perfectly easy time swallowing something far larger than the largest adult menhaden. The slot sized fish, though, have a somewhat tough time getting such a large baitfish in their mouth, so they hoover down a fly a lot more readily than would otherwise be expected from, say, a 40 pounder. 

All good things must come to an end though, and so did this bite window. It ended far earlier than I would have appreciated, frankly. I could do battle with stripers of this size all day long. I was actually using my new White River Fly Shop Heat on this outing, a 7'10" 9wt. It's a cheap fly rod, but currently the only short fly rod on the market that I can afford, and at it's extremely inexpensive price point I'll try anything. Paired with the equally affordable Lamson Liquid and a SA Mastery Titan 10wt line, it's a very lightweight outfit with a good amount of backbone, and frankly it's a hand canon. I'm probably an above average fly caster but having no problem zipping out most of a fly line with a cheap Bass Pro Shops brand fly rod felt a bit wrong. It just proves two points I've known for years: fly setups don't need to be expensive, and fly rods don't need to be 9 feet long to cast well or far. I'm not going to go overboard and call the Heat a great fly rod- it has its flaws. But it's a work horse. I'll be utilizing it quite a bit. 

The ride back, straight up wind, was bumpy. It was worth the ride for those fish though. 

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, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah 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.

Edited by Cheyenne Terrien

Sight Fishing False Albacore

Little tunny seem to move so rapidly most of the time that sight fishing for them would be next to impossible. However, when their behavior lines up with the right conditions it is in fact possible. Slower cruising fish and the right lighting and it is possible to snipe cruising tunny. I've only hit the right conditions once, and it was this season. It was one of the coolest days I've had fishing for scombrids, though the bite window lasted a mere 20 minutes. For that short time, there were dark clouds in front of me and clear skies behind with the sun right at my back, lighting up the water with exceptional contrast. The tunny were running predictable routes and would break sporadically, but the best shot happened when I could see the fish coming in the water, big pods of 20-30 fish, lit up green and blue in the water. 

I was fishing a white and pink Tabory Snake Fly, hoping I could continue to experiment with that the big, erratic fly strategy. I'd see the fish coming, lay the fly out, and strip it quickly as they approached. I got positive reactions each time, but the fish seemed to have a difficult time engulfing that big deer hair headed fly. The first two that grabbed did so abruptly, peeling away from their pods and side swiping the fly. Neither got steel. The third one did though, and it was such a spectacular and visible take- the best tunny take I've ever had. 

Unlike the previous fish I'd had this one actually was exciting. It felt good in some way other than just exhausted relief. Even better, that joy wasn't taken away by the fish breaking off or coming unbuttoned. Instead it very politely came to hand. 

When I got the fish in I could see that it was light up blue, which made for beautiful photography. However it also had severe abrasions from getting stuck in a net, which didn't. The abrasions were interesting because I've often worried about line burns on released tunny. They don't have thick scales or protective slime the way a lot of fish do and this leaves them vulnerable to infections. Very simply, little tunny evolved to be pelagic and fast, and fast pelagic fish don't naturally get abrasions very often. There's no reason for them to have a mechanism for fighting off the side effects of abrasions. This fish made me a little less concerned about it outright killing them. 

Regrettably I didn't manage to make good on any more shots that day but that fish was worth the price of admission. As tunny season wore on, I'd have some more shots in very different circumstances. It kept me entertained despite the overall slow nature of this year's fishing. There have been some big showing but overall it has been very sparse aside from a handful of windows and pockets of concentrated activity. It has been a long season. It's November and they're still here. And I'm still after the damn things.

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, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah 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.

Swinging New York Salmon

Spey casting for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead is kind of a fools errand. The fish aren't like native salmon, they leave a freshwater lake and enter a freshwater river... by the time they get in front of anglers they've mostly already gone though their transition into spawn-focused automatons. There's a reason you can find videos galore of Alaskan cohos smashing topwater flies and none of that from the Great Lakes. They're long done with that by the time they come in. There's also to many damn people. Even in the Douglaston Salmon Run. You can't really rotate when there's a dozen nymphers standing in the run, flogging the same water for hours. The fish also see more flies than any fish should ever have to see. If they were actually native, I'd have a huge problem with the ethics of it, but since they're introduced my problem with it is completely selfish- I want to fish for them the way I want to fish for them, and that just happens to be spey casting which requires room and the ability to cover water. 

So, all that said, there's no other way I'll fish for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead. Even if it's the hardest way. Hey, at least I know my fish ate when I hook one (yeah, I went there). There's very little better than that tight line grab, even if it only happens a few time in a whole day of fishing. 

Rick invited Charlie and I to go to Pulaski and fish the Douglaston Salmon Run again this fall. The weather was very different this go around. It was excessively warm for mid October, and that negatively impacted the fishing. We could easily have wet waded the water was so warm. The kings were around but a lot were entering the river less than fresh. Steelhead were far from numerous and mostly holding in very fast water. And there were of course lots of guys on the run as that week is often the peak, so space to swing was at a premium. I was lucky enough a few times to be able to rotate with a couple other spey casters or have enough water to myself to cover a bit of it before another angler slipped in in front of me, but I got a bit less lucky than last year. 

The fish I wanted most was an adult coho. I'd gotten my first swing steelie last fall and some juvenile cohos this winter. I really hoped for a big, chrome, fired up coho. I ended up getting just that. The fish ate a size 4 Ally's Shrimp and put on a fantastic fight. It was also properly chrome, more chrome I'd ever personally seen before. 

The next couple of fish were all ugly kings. One on an olive and black Intruder, one on a large grey Bugger, one on a Gartside Soft Hackle Streamer. They were in various states of decay. The freshest put up a ridiculous fight with loads of jumps before bolting downriver an forcing me to really reef on it to land it in a waste deep bank trough. 

The to most unusual and unexpected fish of the trip was a native species, a Northern hogsucker that grabbed a blue charm of all things. I love these goofy suckers and their odd black lip coloration. This was the first large one I've caught. My lifer was very small, caught in Western Pennsylvania last fall. This one was much more impressive.

For he next couple days, all I was able to get grabs from was kings, and not many kings at that. A couple of them were pretty seriously big at least. They weren't the best looking fish though. 

Rick and Charlie weren't spey casting and they weren't having fast fishing either. Charlie ended up being the hot hand though with unquestionably the best fish of the trip, and possibly a fish of a lifetime: a gorgeous chrome buck steelhead, a huge one, that took him on a hell of a ride. That's certainly the sort of fish I'd have loved to run into. Of course, I'll have more opportunities. I don't get out there much but I'm slowly figuring things out and refining my technique and fly selection. How many more times will I put up with all the nonsense? Probably way too many times. 

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, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah 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 Mirrors of Autumn

 The fly carp season is winding down. Sure, there'll be some late fall and winter bite windows, but on the whole things are coming to a close. It was a very good year for me. I got a lot of fish, my first mirror and then dozens upon dozens more, the most carp I've ever caught in a single day, my first periodical cicada carp, my first mulberry carp, and two top ten biggest carp. I'm going to go ahead and call it my best carp year since I started fishing for these things seven years ago.

Will watching my best season wind, I spent some time walking and casting to small mirrors and commons. Though the mulberries were months gone I still managed to get a handful of fish to come up for the dry. That was one of the coolest discoveries of my fishing career; getting carp, even tailing carp in as much as three feet of water, to come up for a berry pattern. I still haven't applied this method on a waterway that doesn't have mulberry trees, but I will be doing that next season. 

One evening I was battling waning light and mosquitoes and struggling to get looks from the fish. I was also dealing with walkers throwing rocks in the canal... oh, the joys of fishing high foot traffic areas. I was running out of real estate when I found a shallow tailer on the far bank. I made a kick ass cast and the fish turned to find the fly. It didn't seem to see it, so I stripped it. This sounds absurd, I know, berries don't dart across the surface. But for some reason it works. The fish charged hard and ate. Rarely is a hook set as satisfying when a cast with a dry fly to a carp is so well executed and the fish eats just as perfectly and beautifully as you could want. So, so satisfying. And of course the fish responded fabulously with some thrashing on the surface and a good hard run. It was excellent.

 When I didn't get fish to react to dry flies, I was still able to get them on the good old Ausable Ugly. Honestly those hook sets might be just as satisfying. A carp on the fly is a carp on the fly. They don't come easy most of the time. Each one is a result of hard work and hours of observations. 

Most of my clients this season wanted to carp fish. I only ran a very small handful of trips for other species. From the get-go, I knew it was going to be the trickiest fish for me to get clients onto consistently and that proved very true. Some of the worst conditions of the year also happened to set up right on the days I was booked, which didn't help, leading me to take a couple clients out for discounted redemption trips when they didn't even get a single good shot on their first trips. I have to say thanks to those of you that booked me this carp season. If anyone is interested in learning the ropes of late fall or winter carp fishing, feel free to contact me, but such a trip needs to be planned in accordance with a weather window, so if you don't have flexibility I don't want to waste your time. Hopefully I'll see some of you next season, it' going to be a good one. 

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, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah 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.