September 4, 2016

I've been doing quite a bit of flyfishing for bass this season.  I wanted a change of pace.  I decided to focus on sunfish on Sunday morning.  Didn't even try a bass popper, can you believe it?   :)

Specifically, I was hoping to catch some Pumpkinseed Sunfish.  The water was very muddy, due to all the ducks and geese migrating through the area.  They really really ruin the water clarity.  You'd have to see it to understand...but this pond had recently good water clarity (for Iowa) of 2-3' or more.  Sunday, water clarity varied in some parts, based on waterfowl usage....but at its worst, was maybe 2".  Very bad.

Anyway, I used a microjig under an indicator much of the time, and was oddly plagued with many fish throwing the hook, even though it was very sharp.  Lost a couple really good fish, which might have been either nice bass or BIG Pumpkinseeds.

In addition to good numbers of Bluegills, I did catch just one beautiful Pumpkinseed Sunfish.

The muddied waters may have had the positive effect of encouring the crappies to move into the shallows.  I landed two of them.

Even though I wasn't fishing for them, I caught at least 8 Largemouth Bass.  Nothing over @ 14"....
Here's the smallest of the day:

First Open Water Fish of 2016!!

Hooray!  Its come about 2-3 weeks earlier than expected, which is great!  And it came on FAST!  Just 2 weekends ago, I was icefishing the local ponds, sitting on 11.5" of ice!  And now that ice is gone!

We had a warm week with temperatures that climbed into the 60's, plus some good winds.  As an example of how quickly the ice disappeared, I drove by a few ponds on Friday evening after work.  Most were ~95% ice-covered.  One pond I fish often was 100% ice-covered.  Then by noon on Sunday, every pond I drove by was 100% open water!  I wouldn't have believed it could all have disappeared so quickly!

Anyway...Saturday morning I visited a local lake that just had maybe 50' of open water along the edges on 3 sides of the lake.  Fishing was difficult, but I managed to catch my first pair of open-water fish of the year while flyfishing.