Smallies on the Fly

Because of the rain this morning, I didn't get out to do any trout fishing. In light of limited time due to some other things going on today, I decided to take Adicus out to the river for some smallie action. To my dismay, there was someone already fishing my beat. Damn! Nobody but me fishes that section, I was sad to see someone there. I moved down the road a bit to hit my 2nd favorite section and was pleased to see no one was there.

After parking, I strung up my 5wt that I hadn't fished in ages. The setup for the day was a deerhair frog with a big olive bugger hanging underneath it. Adicus and I shuffled our way across shallow shoals and riffles to get to some of the larger pools and runs. The Pigeon is still running at less than half of its normal flows, so alot of my normal runs are too shallow to hold fish. The fishing started out slow missing some fish that took the bugger. Some time was also spent getting used to slinging something as big and heavy as a deer hair fly and bugger. On the plus side, I only hooked myself once today. A nice deep one in the elbow. Thankfully, the barb didn't get buried, but it still left a nice whole on my arm.

I finally started to catch a few smaller fish on the bugger, but nothing with any size yet. Moving upstream, I came across one of my favorite runs that usually holds a nice fish, if not 2 or 3. I cast near a large rock that swept the flies into a fairly deep run and the bugger was hammered by a respectable 14" smallie. Fight on! The dude put a nice bent into my noodley 5wt. After a few moments, he was brought to hand for a quick photo and release. I landed a few more fish, but nothing bigger than 11" inches.

We came up to another narrow deep run. After a cast that landed with a loud splat, the frog popper was destroyed by a very large bass. How big? I don't know, he popped off only seconds after taking the bug. GGrrrrr! Somewhat disappointed, we continued to fish on. After a few more small fish, another nice run was in front of me. I tossed the combo into the middle of the current and the bugger was immediately taken by a very nice 17" bass. This fish was NOT happy about being on the end of my line. He fought like a true champ. But alas, he ended up laying on the bank next to my rod getting his photo taken.

That was about the last fish that I tied into for the day. We weren't out that long, so I was pretty pleased with the 2 larger fish I caught. Quite a few fish were caught along with a few nice ones. The water is low, but the fish are active right now. Just a nice day to be on the water.