Saturday 6-16-2012

I visited a nearby public pond to ONCE AGAIN badger the grass carp.  The running record is overwhelmingly in the grass carps' favor.  I flyfished, made some casts into the vicinity of several grassies.(Ok, I can pretty much only see them when they are pretty much sitting with their backs out of the water, or when they leave a big swirl as they swim away...so casting into a very general "vicinity" is about the best I can hope for.  Ask me how well this has paid off so far.  No...don't.)
This resulted in 6 bluegills landed, and one hookup with a grass carp.  After a short battle, I reeled in a large scale on the fly hook.  It wouldn't have counted.

Also...don't you just hate it when you start to feel crowded at your fishing spot?  There I was, minding my own business, enjoying some measure of solitude even though there were others fishing on the other side of the pond.
And then...The GANG arrived.  Down the shoreline they came, coming straight for me.  Their nefarious intentions were clear from the beginning...I was about to get MUGGED.  It was obvious they just wanted dough.  The problem is that if you give in and toss them the dough, they don't leave...they just want MORE.  Never satisfied.  Where's the police when you need them?  I didn't give them what they wanted, and eventually they moved on.  I managed to get a snapshot, in case the cops need help to I.D. the perps:

And for my fellow fly-tyers out there...some of these feathers sure look useful!

And then it started to rain, very gentle at first, and I thought I could keep fishing and outlast the rain.  But then it started raining more heavily.  That's when the lightning started striking close by.  So, I got chased off by the storm, and it got the best of me, since I was pretty well soaked by this time.
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A few hours later, the sun was out once again.  I headed back to the same pond.  No grassies were visible anymore, so I started fishing for crappies and bluegills.  I ended up catching about (conservatively) 25 of each on a silver Springbrook Wunder microjig.

While there, a couple younger fellas came down with spinning gear to fish for bass.  They both caught at least one each.  One was big enough to cause major excitement on their part.  Unfortunately, it was bleeding heavily from a gill when they landed it.  They tried releasing it but it was floating belly-up.  One worked for a good 5 minutes or so at reviving it, and the bass did eventually swim away.  I fished for a couple hours after that, including the area where they released the bass.  It never floated back to the surface, so hopefully their efforts will allow that bass to heal and continue living.  If not...well, I hate seeing large bass harvested from these public ponds since they are about the only thing that keeps the bluegill populations somewhat regulated.  But then...turtles gotta eat too.

Towards the end of my outing, several kids (a couple of them recognized me from fishing at this pond before) and a mom came over and wanted me to catch some fish for them to see.  That would be a lot of pressure to put on someone, since the other folks fishing at the pond were struggling to catch anything at all.  But I was catching pretty steadily, so I showed them a couple crappies and a couple bluegills.  They thought I was pretty cool, and they enjoyed releasing the fish back to the water.