Crazy Winter Float and Fly Fishing 1/14/08

Got out for a wade today by 11am. Decided to something entirely new and different (except for the float and fly part). Water was up and cool with some decent clarity.

Sky was overcast temp around 30- 23F dropping as the day progressed with a wind chill in the teens.

Got 7 fish of all sizes in the first hole including this nice 18"er:



And this nice 13" crappie:



Thought for a minute about stringing the crappie up. I almost never catch them. Ended up getting 6 on the day most about the size of my hand. I never catch them because they don't eat 4" baits :-) . Crappie [i]do[/i] eat FnF. More than I caught in the last two years combined!

Hit the other side of the hole and pulled a 16" out of that eddy. Was hampered by low hanging trees- though it looked fishy. I only had two floats on me. So I didn't risk close in casts

Then headed upstream towards my second hole and was delighted to see a spot where I've caught nice fish in the past holding a sizeable eddy with the water up. Basically threw where fish were in the summer and caught 4 on 4 casts! They seemed to spook from my yanking their buddies so I moved up to one final hole.

This was a huge pool that you really can't get at in the summer without a kayak on the west side. In the meantime, my guides were icing up fierce and I had trouble with frozen line. This was a pain the rest of the day. I lost a float and a fly when the line caught on that spool clip on my Pflueger Supreme. Funny, a fish hit the fly and swam with it for a while.

Retied and caught about 16 SMB from dink to 15" in that pool. It was clear there was some kind of circuit swimming going on. The fish were rotating clockwise around the pool. When I found them, bam, bam, bam. A couple idiots even jumped!

With a 4' leader I pulled in this fish in the process of changing color. Looked cool, so I snapped a quick couple pics:







I finally decided to leave the pool because I wasn't finding any pigs, so I turned around and headed back to the second spot. Got a dink and a 17" in the same spot I hit the 4 in a row.

Returned to the first hole finished out the day in the snowfall with a 15, 16, and 3 other 12-14"ers.

It was getting dark and my gloves, waders, and coat were stiff with ice.

Tooks some pics of smaller fish that looked cool. This one had a brass color that was quite striking:





Broke off a jig on a log and went home. Incredible winter day. 32 SMB (18, 17, 2 16, 2 15) 6 crappie, 1 Goog.