Flyfishing for Mid-May (2017) Bass in Iowa

We had some windy days recently that I chose to flyfish anyway.  I caught a bunch of crappie that hit on a microjig/indicator.

Then we had a stormy day when winds reached 60mph.  The next day was decent, so I flyfished during lunch, and caught 8 bass from a pond where catching even one or two would be consider a good lunch hour!  Most hit a topwater (blockhead popper), and a few hit a dark-colored bunny leech variation.

That evening, it was cloudy and breezy-to-windy.  I fished 2 other ponds for bass.  They were still hitting well on the topwater, it was wall I needed to use.  I probably caught a total of 16 more bass in the 2.5 hours I fished until just after dark.
At one point I set the hook on a bass and my line snapped.  Fortunately, my popper came floating to the surface.  It was beyond reach, so I tied on a new one.  The old one was close enough to try to retrieve, so I started flicking my new popper near the old one, trying to snag it for reuse.  I was getting close to that goal, when I watched a large bass rise up slowly, ignore my moving popper, but instead sucked in the old popper floating on the surface, then sunk back out of sight.  I thought it would soon spit the popper back out, but it never floated back to the surface.  Darn!