The Ultimate Crappy Rig

I now have the ultimate crappy fishing rig:

Albright 9ft 10wt XX Rod
Lamson Guru 3.5 Reel
Scientific Anglers Bluewater Express 500 Grain Sinking Line
6ft of 40lb test leader
1/0 Gulley Ultra Craw Fly

What's that? You think it's a little on the stout side for farm pond crappy?

Try Something New Day

One of the nice things about fishing a particular waterway regularly is that, on any given day, there’s typically no real pressure to catch anything. And without that pressure, every now and then you can take a “day off” and try something new – a new fly, a new technique, a new section of water. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter because you’ll be back soon. But if it does work, well, you’ve just expanded your fishing options.

This morning, I mixed it up by:

Dimes, Dogs, and Dear Ones

“Well, I think we’ve figured out what’s wrong with him” said the emergency veterinarian as she snapped Wilderness Dog Sammy’s x-rays onto the lightboard. And while I’m no animal doctor myself, it seemed pretty clear to me as well. His discomfort, no doubt, had something to do with that shiny coin-shaped object, lodged mid-dog.

Dammit, Sam. What were you thinking?

The Longest Silence

What is most emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences – the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is towards the kinds of fishing that are never productive in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting-and-fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him, finally, a condition of utter, mortuary boredom. Such anglers will always be inclined to find the gunnysack artists of the heavy kill rather cretinoid, their stringer-loads of gaping fish appalling. - Thomas McGuane

This opening paragraph from McGuane’s The Longest Silence simply stuns me. In four short sentences, he’s expressed my deepest feelings, thought impossible to communicate in such stark and eloquent language, about my sport. It describes precisely why the one fish day is the cornerstone of my fly-fishing passion.

River Largemouths

This is not your daddy’s bass fishin’.

And it wasn’t mine either, until not all that long ago. Since my childhood, largemouth bass fishing meant farm ponds and spinning rods terminated with purple worms, Original Rapalas, and jitterbugs. Good bass were fat, chunky pigs, lazier as they got bigger, not unlike we fishermen, and a good bassin' day was spent casting from the bank, preferably with a cooler beside you, and filling a stringer.

Today’s incarnation of accepted bassing is fast boats, rods that would yank a tuna from the Mariana Trench, jerk/crank/swim/buzz baits designed by computer, and hard-charging, aggressive fishing. Tournament style. I never got that far, though I probably would have liked to.

But that was before. Before fly-fishing and before river bass.

Three Rivers

The more time I spend on the water, the more I realize that rivers, like people, have personalities and a fisherman sympathetic to his environment establishes relationships with waterways in much the same way as he does with the folks around him. This past week, I had the great pleasure of spending time on three rivers - the Roanoke, the Haw, and the Smith - a renewed acquaintance, an old friend, and a new companion.

The Striper Master

ALL HAIL THE STRIPER MASTER!!!

Well, perhaps hailing is a bit extreme. But, thanking is certainly in order. Pipes, gracias for a fine day aboard the Z.Z. Pipes, chasing striped bass on the Roanoke River. I had a great time.

Yard Work

It's a sad fact, but you can't fish all the time. Sometimes there's yard work.

This is our lawn mower...

An Unremarkable Day

It was an unremarkable day.

Mary was up with the sun this past Friday and was on the road before Wilderness Dog Sammy and I could rub the sleep from our eyes. She was headed to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro to attend a “Native Landscaping and Water Management” workshop. You see, woodlands management is the equivalent of lawn care around our home and she wanted to get some new ideas on how to make this slice of forestland even cozier.

So I was left footloose for the day and that, of course, means fishing. Afternoon soccer commitments and a late poker game conspired to keep me close to home, so there was no room for a westerly trout trip. Instead, I decided to resume what I had started Wednesday, the exploration of my new Haw River.

Nymphing the Shelton Laurel

I don’t know how they do it. How do trout even see these tiny, tiny flies, bouncing through turbulent water along with sand, vegetation, rock debris, and all sorts of other distractions? And not only do they see them, but, in the chaos, are able to snatch them neatly for dinner. It’s a wonder to me and seems akin to my being able to snatch individual gnats out of the air while in a tornado.

I’ve been lamenting the inconsistency in my trout catching results all season and I know that the major hurdle has been my failure to embrace nymphing – the technique of fishing with tiny flies that imitate the larvae of stream dwelling insects. So John’s invitation to revisit his Trout Shack, a short roll cast away from some perfect pocket water on the Shelton Laurel Creek, seemed like a great opportunity to address that shortcoming. No woolly buggers allowed. It was nymphs or nothing for a couple of days.