Something Other Than Trout
It is not at all unusual in the world of fly fishing to target bass but there was a time when targeting anything but trout was seen as a little bit weird. Smallmouth were given the name of Red Eye Green trout, Warm Water Trout, Spiny Trout and a bunch of other names.
If You Aren’t Targeting Bass With Your Fly Rod, You Are Missing Out
Anyways, anybody worth their salt knows fishing for trout is not the beginning and end of fly fishing. I’m not a meteorologist but I do watch radar and I tried to find a place that wasn’t going to be raining and basically it rained everywhere in driving distance of Winnipeg except at the Manigotagan on this June day. It was definitely clouded over and we did hit the rain on the way back.
Multi Fly Rod Fishing for Multi Species
I was doing some different things on this day.
I was trying out a brand new rod that I got at the Fly Fishing Banquet
It’s a rod that had never been fished! From around the 50s era and, without going into people’s names or anything like that, it turns out it was a rod that was given to a bar owner somewhere in Minnesota, in a working class town to pay off a bar tab. Magically it had been in the hands of a few people including a fisherman and it never got fished. So as the person who owned the rod was in a personal care home and they did not donated it to the club to be auctioned of and not fished, I want to make sure that it saw some fish and didn’t become a museum piece.
So I got a bass on the on the first cast.
Then I can proceed to catch a bunch of bass and some really good ones in the 16 range and the rod balance was good. I might want to get a heavier reel to balance it out but for the most part a match catch reel that was a little bit oversized for it worked out great. I also tried my tenkara rod that day I was able to hook more fish than usual with it because there’s something about the drift in a tenkara rod that just is more enticing. Landing fish with the tenkara is very very hard as you can’t reel it up and the rod has a lot of spring to it and with that current coming off the of woods Falls think I only I don’t think I managed to land a single fish but I had a lot of fun hooking them and then getting off.
Here are some pictures and video from that day.
The fishing was so good why not go back the next week?
I have figured out that this spot is very much a springtime into summer fishing location. We have been there late winter, barely spring, and has been poor and we’ve been there in the fall a couple of times and it’s surprisingly poor considering there’s so many small mouth bass. But spring into summer it is wicked good so you got to strike while the iron’s hot and that’s what we did one only a week later.
It was a brighter day but the fishing was still great! I use the seven weight bamboo again and my Tenkara
As I type this post It is January the 22nd The high today is supposed to be like -29° C if you buy into the whole “feels like” thing, the wind chill supposedly makes it feel like -44° So I’m enjoying looking open water, sunshine, and fish on a day like today.
BTW, the winning fly here and basically for the season is one I developed. A mostly white Muddler in the rolled muddler variation we have deemed “Rage Bait” a name sort of of our time but also a reaction to how trout and bass hit this thing.
Robert Burton
info@flyfishingmanitoba.com
204-770-0846 (Texting only)
Rivers Finally Become Fishable
The month of May at us going to the same secret trout stream that well I don’t keep it a state secret I don’t post it on the Internet because we know what Internet does to fishing spots. So we went on the 9th and the 25th. On the 9th when I caught 19 fish. The fish were stacked up in the pools and not in the rapids. The water was quite cool and there would be 20 to 60 fish in each pool. Which was amazing that we only managed 19 for the day but was really good to see is a lot of fish in a lot of places as opposed to the main spots as usual. Travelling from spot to spot, we probably scared as many fish as we saw.
The next time
The second time we went it was fished till sunset and and drove out in the dark. The air temperature was 21 to 12 and we got so many on rolled muddlers and nymphs and a few on drive flies just for the fun of it! and he has you know it’s late at night but you got fish until sunset more often that’s for sure!
And Again
We were going to fish a different area and then we saw so many birds of prey that we decided to fish the main trout section. Now you may say what does that have to do with anything but, over the years we have found that when the solunar cycle is at a certain way the birds of the prey and the animal activity of predators goes up and it does seem to correlate to fish activity and it turned out to be the right idea. We went straight to our favorite pool got fish but we found fish in all sorts of places and were able to catch them in pools that haven’t had fish in for quite a number of years. Hard to fish pools and in some pools that we only find available and active later season so it was actually very hard to leave the fishing was so good we caught like 60 fish between us.
Oh Heck Why Not Go Again and Make a Weekend of It?
Left straight from work on Saturday and got to start fishing around 4 in the afternoon until sunset. Stayed overnight in a motel in the area and went back on the river by eight in the next morning got off about 11 to drive home as I had a gig that evening. We found a Beaver Dam down way downstream and it was full of fish. We really only got to look at a little bit because of the long walk back And it looks like there’s more of a below that and so we’ll be looking at that later on this year. Both look extremely fishable as opposed to you know Beaver dams where it’s so mushy on the outsides of it that you can’t get at it except by standing on the dam and tangling your line up in all the sticks! When we went back the next day we just basically fished some of the closer spots to where we park.
The winning fly for that day though was a tie that I had made over the winter that I thought might be good for a bass and it’s basically a rolled muddler done in all white so white rolled feathers, crystal flash and white deer hair for a body and based on the way the fish hit it it has been named Rage Bait.
Having Too Much Fun Fishing to Take too Many Photos
I promise, the next installment will not be brook trout from a Creek I can’t tell you about.