Bank Beating Boy

Asher has been pounding the pond this week. For the past couple of days, he's gotten to spend a couple of afternoon hours per day walking the bank and slipping a cast everywhere he can squeeze between the trees. If Asher is fishing, he is happy, but to make a good thing even better, the fish have been pretty cooperative. I believe both days produced five or six fish, and yesterday's catch included one 15-inch bass. (He toted around a cooler lid that had a measuring rule on it.) He has caught a few bluegills, but most fish have been bass.

Asher's approach has been simple. He has stuck with a Lindy Watsit Grub and mixed swimming it and hopping it along the bottom. Normally we have to vertical fish in the deepest part of the ponds to catch much during mid-December, but the weather has been so mild that the fish are still acting like it's mid-autumn.

The Hold 'Em Hole

Asher and I had caught a half a dozen or so trout in a half hour or so and had missed several others, so action had been decent. The hole he is fishing in the picture above made the afternoon, though.

We'd make a couple of downstream casts and had worked our baits back through the current without bites when I cast my Road Runner Marabou downstream and across the current, let the lure sink in the eddy until it caught the current, and then held it still while it swang out into the current. I was holding the rod tip motionless when a fish smashed my lure. I battled what I thought to be a really big fish initially because of the current and landed a solid rainbow.

After releasing that fish, I told Asher that I hadn't been working my lure when that fish hit and then repeated the cast to demonstrate. Just like it was scripted, as I told him I was "just letting it swing out into the current like this" another trout slammed my bait in the same place.

As you might guess, I hadn't even landed my fish yet when Asher mimicked the cast with a Lindy Watsit Grub, and before long he was fighting a trout of his own. And so it went. I think we ended up catching releasing nine from that run before they finally quite biting.

We fished a bit farther downstream and had a couple of other strikes, but the afternoon was fading so we soon had to call it an afternoon and begin walking toward the car. I'm curious now whether the fish were just ridiculously wadded up in that one hole or whether we simply didn't discover the right "non-presentation" until we got to that particular hole. I guess we'll never know!

Middle of Nowhere Bluegills & Blog Reawakening

For starters I must acknowledge that the pond trip I'm reporting was more than a week ago. I've fallen woefully behind with posting blogs. More so than since I started this blog, I'm pretty sure. Plan is to fix that, beginning immediately. I also haven't fished enough since my return from the Trout Trek as I've been playing catch-up on writing. Plan is to fish at least three full days this week, so that part should be reconciled too!

On our most recent pond outing, Asher and I weren't getting much action by throwing the usual stuff around the usual cover. Then I randomly threw a Lindy Watsit Grub toward the center of the pond, let it sink, and started to work it a little deeper than we had been fishing. Almost immediately, I caught a bluegill. Naturally, I repeated the cast, and the result was the same. That showed Asher and me what we needed to know, and we proceeded to catch a bunch of bluegills and a couple of bass.

I found no rhyme or reason to what the fish were relating to, and they weren't in the deepest water, near the dam, like they sometimes are during the summer. They were in the middle, but up the pond, maybe relating to the channel that divides a shallow flat. The pond is small enough that you don't have to get really precise to catch them if you find the right general area. I've never really noticed the fish positioned the way they were on that day, but maybe I haven't cast to that area enough to have found them when they've been there. You can bet I'll try it again when the fish aren't around the regular stuff!

Ice Edge Trout in the South Carolina Upcountry

"I've never seen that before."

I'm not sure how many times Bruce Stanton and I said that or something like it today, always related to the cold and its effects. It started with crunching through a wide rim of ice just to get to open water. The snowy banks and icy river reminded me of pictures I see of fishermen targeting brown trout and steelhead in Pennsylvania and New York and were not what I'd expect to ever see in South Carolina.

We also saw trout rising, something I've not seen with the water and air as cold as it was today. I guess they were eating miniscule midges or something in the surface film because we never saw any bugs come off the water.

The next "never seen that" was major icing on lures. I'd seen plenty of ice in rod eyes (had to clear that about every four casts much of today) and on reel spools and bails on other trips, but never on lures that stayed submerged much of the time. Our lures got so icy so quickly that we couldn't fish hard baits as effectively as normal, and even with jigs we had to clear the ice off the hooks every now and then. I'm pretty sure a couple of fish I missed today were because of a hook that was iced over and lacking a sufficient point.

On the positive side, we ended up utilizing a pattern that I certainly had never seen. The fish were holding right along the edges of the ice in the big pools, seemingly using the ice as cover and ambushing baits in the modest adjacent current. Once we figured that out, we were able to aim casts upstream and close to the ice line and work Lindy Watsit Jigs and Fuzz-E Grubs close to the bottom and close to that edge and found good success by doing just that.

I suppose it's not surprising that we had the river to ourselves, considering a starting temperature of 12. Fishing was good, though, and it was a fun day on the river. And in truth the extremity of the conditions for this part of the country and all the ice only added to the adventure.

For more on one of my favorite areas to play, visit Upcountry South Carolina.

Bluegill Bite the Main Attraction

The fact that Nathaniel and I scored a double to get things started during yesterday's pond outing wasn't so unusual. The odd part was the fact that he caught the bluegill and I caught the bass. Usually, I'm the one who reaches first for the ultralight while he has trouble putting down his bass rod. In truth, I caught my bass on my ultralight, but it our double seemed backward, and Nathaniel really had set down his bass rod and picked up his ultralight.

Nathaniel's bluegill set the tone for our short afternoon outing. His "little pole" was rigged with a tiny Lindy Watsit Grub, and from the time he caught that bream, I'm not sure he put it down, because virtually every time he cast it to the pond's edge, he got hit, and often he would end up hooked up with a good-sized bluegill. In fact it wasn't long before I found myself digging in the box for a Watsit of my own so I could get on the action too. I caught a couple of 'gills on my starter, but he probably caught 10 in the same amount of time.

I also managed to pull a couple of crappie off the pond's spillway structure after I switched to a Watsit; however, the bluegills absolutely were the main attraction. Weather and time dependent, we might slip back out to the same pond this afternoon, and if we do, I'll be you can guess how we'll both be rigged to start the outing!

Dry Run Delight

After a bit of a break for lunch, we're back to the stream, and Nathaniel is trying to coax a bite from a big one with an XCalibur Twitch Bait. Dry Run Creek has some seriously big trout in it, and a few have given chase already.
A special regs stream that's open only to youth and disabled anglers only for catch and release fishing with single-hook barbless hooks, Dry Run is an absolute gem for young anglers. It stays loaded with trout, including a bunch of big ones.
Nathaniel loves to fish here, and I value the opportunity to gather a lot of trout photos.
The fish wouldn't quite commit to the Twitch Bait, so he's back to throwing a Watsit Grub. Oh! Trout on. I'd better run!

Watsit Wear-Out

Nathaniel has put on a show this afternoon,  catching a bunch of trout, including a few big ones. His two biggest browns -- one absurdly fat and one long and lean -- both probably pushed close to 4 pounds. He's also caught a couple of spectacular-colored rainbows that probably weighed about 3 pounds.
He's caught all his fish on a Lindy Watsit Grub, although he just switched to a Twitch Bait and is fishing a big-fish hole.
Although I'd love to cast into these fish-filled runs, it really is fun watching Nathaniel approach and work them and be rewarded when his approach is good and the fish choose to cooperate.

Brown Trout Day

Well, the live blog notion isn't going as I had hoped because the signal by Dry Run Creek is so weak. First post still hasn't published so everything I write might show up at one time.

As a quick update, it's been a brown trout day so far and the best fish catcher has been a Lindy Watsit Grub. The brownie part is somewhat odd because the sun couldn't be shining any brighter. The most productive lure so far doesn't surprise me at all.

Time for us to go find lunch. Maybe the first couple posts will post when we ride to town.

Having Fun Without Me

Nathaniel and Asher slipped off to the pond for a couple of hours yesterday while I was sitting at the computer writing fish stories. Spring is progressing quickly, and it was obvious at the pond. A couple of weeks ago, the fish wouldn't touch topwater. Less than a week ago, they were slapping surface lures but not quite taking them. Yesterday they were smashing them, and a Tiny Torpedo was Nathaniel's best lure.Asher caught four fish yesterday, all on a Lindy Watsit Grub. Cast, reel, jerk, catch! He's getting ever-more proficient casting and working a lure. He also spotted a shallow fish from the dock and tried to sight-cast to it. Apparently he could see it too well, though, because when the fish turned on his bait and opened its mouth he reacted by jerking and yanked the bait right out of the water, also spooking the fish. He told me this morning that he hopes they can go back today to get another shot at that fish.