Droppers

One of my favorite ways to fish from late spring through fall is to rig a Rebel Micro Pop-R or Crickhopper with a fly a couple of feet beneath it on a dropper. It provides a double appeal, and I'll catch some fish on the surface lure and some on the fly. Often when a fish hits and misses my popper or hopper, a moment later the lure will dart under like a bobber, and I think it's often the same fish that spotted a simple meal hanging in front of it after having been drawn in by the surface lure. The technique works well for bass, panfish and trout.

With such things in mind, I spent a little early-hours time today tying a few bugs to take with me to New England. None are specific patterns (at least not intentionally). The main common denominators, I suppose, are that they are at least a little ugly and crudely tied. With a few, I'm hopping to suggest grass shrimp or tiny light-colored minnows. The others are generalists, simply meant to look like some kinds of aquatic insect, tiny fish or critter of some other sort. Most are streamer sorts because I move the top bait a fair amount, but I'm kind of wishing now that I'd tied a few that looked a bit nymphier.

It's hard to say if I'll even break out the bug box, but I figured it couldn't hurt to have a few dropper flies handy, and if I'm going to use a fly, I'd certainly prefer to use one I tied.

#CatchFishAnywhere #NortheastAdventure

Rebel Critter Two Step

While stream fishing in the Ouachita Mountains last week, Bruce Stanton and I mostly used two-pronged lure presentations, making the most of the functionality of Rebel Crawfish and Crickhoppers. Both lures float naturally and dive a couple of feet and wobble when you pull them through the water.

Most of the smallmouths, spots and assorted panfish in Mountain Fork and the Ouachita River were close to shoreline cover and looking up, so we would cast toward the bank, let the bait settle for just a moment and then twitch it and pause it a few times to make it dance on top. Often a fish would blast the lure on the top. If it didn't, we'd then move to step two, which involved reeling the lure back to engage it's subsurface swim.

On that particular trip, if we had only used the lures as crankbaits, by casting and immediately reeling them back, we'd have probably missed out on 80 percent of the fish we caught. Other days, the opposite would be the case. Often, strikes occur about evenly with both approaches. Experiment, and the fish will let you know.

The cool thing is that you don't have to choose. Just as we mostly did, you can incorporate topwater fishing and cranking into every cast.