Thursday, March 22, 2012

Warmwater Fly-Fishing Report, 3-21-2012

This post is a bit out of order.  Just got back from a Spring Break trip with my family to the Dominican Republic.  I'll probably blog about that here (separately), but THIS is the blog of my first fly-fishing outing since our return to Iowa.

Our flight got in around 10pm, but you never know about possible delays, so I took the following day off work as well.  The kids are still officially on Spring Break.

I'd stayed up late and unpacked, so I was ready to go fishing Wednesday morning.  I didn't get up very early.  The sky was cloudy, threatening more rain to follow the overnight rain we received.  I went to a local public pond and started fishing around 9am.  Fishing was good!  In the next 3 hours, I caught 28 Bluegills, 13 Green Sunfish, and 7 Crappies.  I measured one decent crappie at 11", then caught an even bigger one that measured 13".  That is a very nice crappie for around here, and HUGE for any of the public ponds.  I was very pleased!

Here's pictures of a few of the fish:
Bluegill
A nice Crappie.

Love the colors and patterns!
An 11" Crappie...very chunky fish.

This (and the picture below) is the 13" beast Crappie.  All the others I caught were Black Crappies...this was the only White Crappie I caught this day.

I also spotted this large Bullfrog under the water amongst the rocks near my feet:

Oh...and I CAUGHT a Crayfish on my line!  I saw it walking around underwater, so I dropped my microjig to the bottom near the crayfish and moved it a bit.  It turned and started chasing it.  Once it grabbed hold of the microjig, I lifted it and swung it out onto the grassy area behind me, where it finally let go and dropped to the ground.  Fly-fishing for crayfish!  :)

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I tallied up my fish total for the morning, and discovered I was 2 fish shy of 50.  I decided to hit another pond on my way home.  I fished the 2nd pond for 1 hour, and caught 12 Bluegills.  For the entire 4 hours I spent fishing then, I caught 60 fish total....which works out to an average of 1 fish every 4 minutes.  Not bad!

3 comments:

  1. fly fishin is stupid. reel men use live bait!

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  2. Hilarious! :)
    The most important thing is to get out and enjoy fishing. Everybody has their favorite methods. When I was a child, my Dad taught me how to catch fish with live bait and stink bait. It worked. As I've grown, I've tried to continue to challenge myself as an angler. Anybody can feed fish by using live bait...although that can be a fun and productive way to fish, it is less challenging. Maybe because I fish so much, I even got somewhat bored with spin-fishing with lures. I still do use spinning gear, on occasion. Fly-fishing is just a lot more fun for me. And its very productive. This past winter, I challenged myself to not use live bait while ice-fishing. That also worked very well. I didn't catch as many bluegills, but caught plenty of crappies.

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  3. Very nice!! That crappie is a pig for sure , love catching em when they get that size.

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