Reflecting on 2014 - best bluegill days

As I mentioned in my prior post, my best guess is that I fished 15 days last year. When looking through my pictures I can see that I either fished from a float tube for bluegills or fished in small New Hampshire streams for small trout.

Below I have pulled together some of the images I took while float tubing for sunfish in a local farm pond.  The pictures remind me of how many big bluegills I caught last summer, mostly in August.  When dressed in spawning colors, they are beautiful.  Especially gorgeous is the pumpkinseed shown in the second to last photo.

All were taken on a 9 foot 5 weight.  My friend Paul built for me a custom 9 foot 4 weight for my birthday, which I am looking forward to using on my next day in the float tube, likely to be the middle of June.

Sometimes I will use a double wet fly or/or nymph fly rig.

Even when I switch the flies I find the second fly

catches more.

My friend Paul makes these mini-Clousers using Craft Fur

My very last "double hackle"

I was fishing from my Hobie Float Cat on Saturday for bluegills and bass.  There had been some big shifts in the weather conditions last week and this usually puts the fish down.  It did this time as well.

Poppers didn't bring the fish up, so I went deep.  Using my usual patterns; specifically, a weighted small peacock herl bugger and a "fluffy" grey beadhead nymph I was only picking up a fish every 5 minutes or so.  For this particular fishery this is very slow fishing.

So, I pulled out my big Bugger Barn box and looked over the other choices.  In the corner was a single grey chenille "double hackle" fly.  This type of fly is also called a "fore-and-aft" fly.  I've never tied one of these. Instead, quite a few years ago, I received a dozen or so of them from Jim LaFevers, a friend in Texas. There's an article about this pattern on my Web site, here.

This fly stood up nicely.  This is how it photographed
after catching some 40 bluegill and several bass.

I had forgotten how productive this simple pattern could be. After all, its only chenille and hackle. I love and prefer simple patterns. It is always a joy for me to catch fish on something simple.  (Maybe it makes me feel like I am a better fisherman for it.)

In many ways the "double hackle" seems to be a rather primitive pattern, coming from the day when we were less sophisticated about fly patterns.  "Back then" patterns were fewer as materials were harder to come by, pattern books were less available (with small and sometimes only black and white pictures), and there was no Internet to share ideas, techniques, fly photos and patterns.  I'm thinking back to the 1960s when I first started fly fishing. The only flies I had were those bought at the local hobby shop. Although I didn't tie flies back then, all one needed to tie this pattern was chenille from a fabric or craft store and hackle of just about any quality.

On Saturday this fly turned out to be a winner.  On the first three casts I picked up three fish, and I was off to the races.  I really believe the pattern's attractiveness was mostly about the presentation.  Not so much my presentation of the fly, but how the fly by its nature presented itself.

This is what I am thinking....

The fly casts beautifully on my 9 foot 5 weight Sage DS2, a moderate or moderate-fast rod.  The fly holds water easily which adds weight when being cast, but wind resistance is far less than, say, a fully hackled woolly bugger.  At any rate, the fly turns over nicely on 4x or 5x tippet.  When it lands, it splats.  Maybe this is a trigger, though it had to sink a bit before I would pick up strikes.  And when it comes to sinking, perhaps the rate of sink was the trigger.  Unlike other flies I fish below the surface, this had no extra weight on it.  The size 8 3x long hook was weight enough.

In terms of matching something found in nature, what I saw mostly on the farm pond I was fishing was dragonflies.  My guess is that the size of this "double hackle" matched closely the size of a dragonfly nymph.  But who knows...

I don't need to know why this pattern works.  I just know that I need to tie some more. (Or, send an appeal to Jim!)

A strategy for finicky panfish during the "dog days of summer"

I heard on the evening news last night that this has been the warmest first six months of the year (overall, for the entire country) in history.  Since we don't have central air-conditioning at our house, we have been suffering these last few weeks.  I don't think the fish like it either.

Locally there's not a chance that I will fish for trout.  Some will find underground springs to help them holdover, but my guess is that a lot will die off. 

So, I fished again today from my floattube for bass and panfish.  But the fishing on my favorite farm pond was as slow as I have ever seen it.  I fished the first 30 minutes without any action, trying topwater poppers and hoppers and gradually fishing deeper and deeper.   Nothing.

Thinking about what other strategy I could try, I felt a need to fish something smaller and deeper.  If I had some really heavily weighted small nymphs I would have tried them. Something like a Copper John would have been excellent. But, sometimes the best strategy for getting small nymphs down deep without adding more weight is to make adjustments to your leader.

I was fishing my standard panfish leader:  A 6 foot tapered leader with about 2 feet of tippet added.  That usually means a 3x tippet as that nicely turns over the poppers and buggers.  To get deeper, I added about 3 feet of 5x tippet to the 2 feet of 3x tippet to create a 10 1/2 foot leader.  I attached a beadhead and went to work.  The 5x tippet material helped the beadhead sink because its thinner diameter sliced and sank through the water better.  It also placed the fly further from the end of the floating fly line. Once the fly is down deep, it is important to move the beadhead only slightly because when you strip the line the beadhead will move up in the water column, and away from the fish.

This worked great.  I kept the line barely taught and waited for the subtle "tap, tap, tap".  The first beadhead was a size 12 herl body nymph with a short tail of rabbit fur.  Basically, my "Hare & Herl Bugger" without the hackle.  I managed to catch some big bluegills, and I also managed to loose a couple of fish that got wrapped around lily pads or underwater structures.  With 3x I can usually coax them toward me, but 5x is a different story.

I then moved to an even smaller nymph.  Probably a 14, but it had no tail.  Just a bead head, white wool body and a couple of wraps of white hackle tied aft, rather than in front.  Little white grubs like this work well for me during the summer.  I find this interesting because usually I find dark colors better.  To really change things up, try a white grub on a scud hook.  This gives the nymph a little wiggle.  Unfortunately, the scud hook grub was another fly I was without today.  I would have tried it next.

Below is a picture of what was perhaps the largest (almost 10")  bluegill of the day, followed by the largest (and only) Pumpkinseed.  Pumpkinseeds don't get quite as large as bluegills.  At nearly 9" this was a big one.

First outing at the "Land of the Nuclear Sunfish"

Every year I look forward to my first day on a local farm pond my brother calls "The land of the Nuclear Sunfish".  That's because the sunfish are very large here, especially for New England.

On this first outing of the year I caught more small ones than usual, but nevertheless most measured an honest 8.5" to 9.5" in length.  The largemouth bass here are big too, and I do catch a fair bunch of smaller ones (under 14"); but mostly the big ones are there for the baitcasters who can stand in their boats and yank them out of the weeds.  We're all helped by the fact that this is a catch-and-release fishery.

This is a float tube pond.  Wetlands surround the pond and the lily pads around the circumference is dense.  Fortunately there's a dock that I can use to get myself in and out of the water.  From here I usually take about 3 hours to circle the pond once, in counterclockwise fashion, then I go home.

The yellow gurgle-pop popper has always been my favorite for surface play.  These sunfish like big flies, so I tie my foam poppers on a size 6 barbless (Cabela's) dry fly hook.  The size of the hook may be one reason I catch the bigger sunfish (and why I catch generally the smaller bass). I often fish an entire outing with nothing but this size 6 yellow foam popper.

But this day I had a new experience.  Half way through my morning I lost the third and last guggle-pop in my box, when a very large (I presume) bass broke me off around lily pads. 

Searching my box for anything foam, I spied in the corner two samples of a foam hopper pattern I had first tied when "razor foam" was a new product. I hadn't fished this pattern for a while.  And, when I last used it, it was probably on a smallmouth river.

Long story short, the fished loved this fly.  It's thinner than my poppers and due to the bullet head it will not "pop".  Maybe this, or the black body, are the features the fish were attracted to!  The sad news is that I lost both of these foam hoppers before I finished fishing; but the good news is that the second one was lost just minutes before reaching the dock to go home!

It's been a while since I have tied flies, but now I will have to: Gurgle-pops and foam hoppers!

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Additional Image

Not caught with a foam popper or hopper, I did catch a few on a streamer early in the day when the water was coolest.  This bluegill is nearly 10" long.  It was the catch of the day.

A good day fishing for panfish

This has been a crazy summer. July was one of the coldest and wettest in history here in New England, and I don't think I was even once was able to fish a river. Well, maybe once. But generally water levels were what they normally are in May, right after spring runoff.

That left me fishing ponds from my hobbie float cat. But even that has been something I have avoided for about two weeks due to the oppressive August humidity and high temperatures.

Well, I finally got out on Sunday and the fishing was fantastic. Humidity was down a bit, temperatures were below 90F, and there was enough of a ground level breeze to keep me happy.

The closest thing I had to the yellow jackets that were swarming the lily pads and were getting sucked in by the bluegills was a single Brooks-style yellow stonefly nymph which I tied with rubber band strands for a tail. Lots of action! It was unweighted and I fished it right along the edge of the lily pads with great success until I lost it after one vicious strike which could only have been a pickerel.

The reward was bluegills (males) in spawning colors. On the other hand, one photo here is of a male (yes?) in post-spawn lack-of-color. It was the greyist colored bluegill I had ever seen, and I thought a picture would provide an interesting contrast to the bright-colored spawning males.

After loosing that one-and-only yellow stonefly nymph I switched to the only other yellow fly I had with me. This is my own little version of a Dark Edson Tiger. (Mr. Edson named his fly after the "dark" wing and not the "light" body; the Light Edson Tiger is tied with a yellow wing and peacock herl wrapped body.) The bluegills slammed it and typically this meant removing the streamer with foreceps, whereas when I had fished the nymph it was usually dangling from the upper lip. A couple of bass fell for it too.

First visit this year to the Land of the Nuclear Sunfish

When water levels are high (as they are in New England right now) I turn from river trout fishing to bass and panfish in local ponds. My favorite was named by my brother as the "Land of the Nuclear Sunfish". For the life of me I can't figure out where the smaller sunfish are. Really, truly, 90% of the sunfish I catch are between 8.5" and 9.5". Granted I use fairly large flies. And maybe the rules of the pond are the big 'uns get first crack at any food source. Well, whatever.

I had a great first day and took a few pictures (link below), including a photo of the fly I caught all the fish with. The top one in the photo is a virgin fly to show you how it looks after tying. The conehead gets it deep, and the fly is tied with only one material: rabbit fur from a pelt or from a zonker strip.

The instructions are simple: (1) a patch of fur tied in as a tail, about the length of the shank, (2) dubbed body using a dubbing loop and fur cut short (or just use pre-made rabbit dubbing) and (3) a collar of fur applied using a dubbing loop. I get a big kick out of fishing real simple flies! (I plan to take some step by step photos one of these days, but it is a pretty straight-forward pattern.)

The bluegill pictured below was one of 3 that measured (plus or minus) 10". Total take on the one conehead fly this day was about 60 sunfish with a few perch mixed in.


You can see more (7) and bigger images here:

http://www.peterfraileygalleries/nuclearsunfish