Fly-Fishing Report, 10-9-2011

It was once again my turn to drive the carpool of teenage girls to their Iowa Youth Chorus rehearsal in Des Moines.  I had 1 hour 15 minutes to fish at nearby Copper Creek Lake before I needed to pick them up again for the return trip home.

It was a sunny day, unseasonably warm at 85 degrees, and rather windy at 15-17 mph, with gusts to over 20mph.  The area of the lake closest to where I like to park was also the end of the lake that had wind blowing directly into it.  This should make for good fishing, but also a bit more work for fly-casting.

I've noticed over the past week that the algae mats and weedbeds have nearly disappeared, as they do every Fall.  Its been really warm and sunny lately, so it must be an "angle of sunlight" thing?  As the weeds die off and start decomposing, the water clarity diminishes a bit because of the release of nutrients back into the system.  Then the water clears up again as the water temperatures continue to drop for Winter.

Anyway...so the water clarity was noticeably worse than my last visit to this lake 2 weeks ago and this was no doubt worsened by the churning of the wind & waves over the past several days.  I could still see down at least 12".

In this lake, darker colored fly patterns have been good to me, so I used a black microjig with a black dry-fly hackle collar.  I tried it at various times both with and without an indicator about 3' above the microjig.

I caught a decent, but skinny, bluegill right away, and then nothing for awhile.  I eventually caught 5 very small largemouth bass, and 2 more bluegills.  I moved up and down the shoreline, trying some different areas before I left, and found one spot where I caught 2 crappies.  The first one was the bigger of the two, very deep-bodied.  I'd guess it was close to 12".  Then I had to head out.

Right before I'd left the house to start the carpool, I looked out on the back deck and saw a gray female Praying Mantis working on something in a spiderweb.  I grabbed the camera and went to see what was going on.  She was feeding ravenously on SOMETHING.  Judging by the size of her abodmen, she will be depositing her egg case soon.  I could't positively identify what she was feeding on, but I strongly suspect it was the funnel-web's owner, a large spider.  The Mantis seemed quite comfortable walking on the web without getting stuck.  I checked later and it was gone.