Tuesday, March 25, 2014

First Open-Water Flyfishing Trip of 2014!!

While en return route from my family's Spring Break trip (a post or two on that will be forthcoming), my friend Dale G. sent me a text that he had fished Lake Petocka earlier that day.  It had some open water (still had a lot of ice on it, though), and that he'd caught 48 trout while flyfishing!

I had planned to check it out once I returned to Iowa, but now I KNEW it was ready for fishing!
I was excited.

So, I headed for Lake Petocka the very next day, fly rod in hand.  Long story short, I didn't do nearly as well as Dale had.   I can only speculate on the reasons.  In the first 3 hours of fishing the NW corner, I had only caught 3 trout.  I headed down along the shore, and picked up another before I ran into the NE corner of the lake.  Here I found a small concentration of fish, and fairly quickly caught 15 more trout, all on beadhead Woolly Buggers.  White ones and gold ones worked best for me this day.

Fished the entire length of the west side and didn't catch any more fish.

Here's some pics:



And next is the first video I've shot with my GoPro camera.  I'm still learning how to use it and edit videos...So hopefully they will get better as time goes on.  Anyway, you can see the ice sheet on the lake in the background.  Hopefully this works!

6 comments:

  1. Looks like a good day of fishing to me! I like the video , did you have it on your head or how did you attach it. You did a good job of keeping it focused on what you were doing. One of these days I'll get one of those for myself....

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  2. Glad you liked it! :)
    I used the "chesty" chest mount. I think maybe I needed to tilt the camera down towards the water just a little more. Its hard to know...
    But, it was certainly easy enough to flyfish without it being in the way. I considered using a head/cap mount, but our heads move around constantly, whereas our trunks...not nearly as much. There are pros and cons to each I suppose.

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  3. I should probably mention...The photos were not taken with the GoPro. They were taken with my iPhone 4S.

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  4. I agree with Jeff, need to get one of those Go Pro's. Enjoyed the video and congrats to a successful day. Thanks for the report.

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  5. Good work, Dave. Nice to see some open water your way. Enjoyed the video and pictures. Were you fishing a floating line or a sinking line? Could not tell from the video.

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  6. Thanks Mel.
    I was using a floating line. That's pretty typical for me.

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