I have written a few posts on fly fishing and up until now, am still of average experience throwing flies to catch bass. This is one of those stories.
I found a new stretch of water that is split in two by a bridge. The “canal” is about 100 feet wide and you can just barely cast a large fly to both banks. The first day fishing this water, my buddy and I were tossing average sized poppers and having pretty good success. I lost a big one, and so did my buddy, but we managed to pull in a few average bass. Nothing to write home about, but nonetheless, there were fish here. One of those fish was a 14 inch yellow perch, which I very seldom see a yellow perch that large.
The next day I went back. I had to. It was overcast, and I tied on the popper just as before, and tossed it into the brush by the bank. Pop. Pop…Nothing. I continued to use poppers, streamers, nymphs, big flies small flies, etc. Still nothing. The day was coming to a close and a friend had given me a Hildebrant spinner (fly) that is really tiny. I began catching crappie and ig mutant bluegill. This was alot of fun because I was still using the 5 weight rod.
One cast I hooked into a massive bluegill, and I merrily stripped my line in and got him to about 5 feet from my kayak when something happened. An enormous fish splashed in the water, and the next thing I know, that bluegill gained about 5 pounds and got extremely strong. Could it be? Did that huge fish EAT the bluegill? Yep.
So here I am in the kayak and I have a MASSIVE fish on the end of the line attached to the huge bluegill that has the fly hooked in his mouth. The fight was incredible, the fish had actually taken the bluegill down to the bottom and I had to let line out so that I didn’t snap off. After about 30 seconds of this fight, the big fish let go of the bluegill, now stunned, and I hauled him into the boat.
After inspecting the bluegill I noticed that there were no teeth marks on the fish (I had obviously thought a pickerel had tried to eat him). This could only leave one conclusion: it was a bass.
Now keep in mind the bluegill was so big that I could barely fit my hand around him, and I have pretty big hands. He was about 7 inches long and about 5 or 6 inches “tall”. This means that the bass had to be able to fit this fish in his mouth.
*gulp*
Needless to say I am going back to this stretch of water with some massive flies ready to fish. Moral of the story, in order to catch big fish, I suppose you need to cast really really big flies.
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