I haven't been on top of my blogging lately, but I have been fishing (reports to come soon)!
Of course, fishing requires fly tying, and we are still having our monthly Chi-Tie social tying event for those in the Chicago area!
Tonight at 6:30pm I'll be doing a quick demo of one of my flies, the "Mad Stripper." This fly has so much fishy motion and mojo, you'll want to tie a few.
I almost forgot that I went to Florida a few weeks ago! Okay, I'm kidding--I didn't forget, of course. But I've been so G.D. busy or tired from being busy that I'm just now posting about this adventure. To jog your memory, I went down to Miami on a work-related trip for a weekend. But with my birthday being the following Tuesday, I finagled my way into staying down in South FL through Wednesday to
squeeze in some celebratory fishing. My wife Tiffany had joined me down there,
unable to deny herself some summer-like heat and sunshine she wasn't getting up
here in Chi-town.
First things first, I landed in Fort Lauderdale, and drove
straight over to the beach to look at some water. The winds
were high oceanside, so I wet a line in a mangrove-lined channel out back and
got a micro version of a jack crevalle on the ole' chart/white clouser:
Then it was time to work, which only left me and Tiffany
about an hour around dusk to search the canals for peacock bass. I had two
decent fish swipe my fly in these dark hours, but nothing stuck.
Finally, on Sunday, I was able to fish in the midday sun. I hooked up with DJ Dan Decibel of Skinny Water Culture to increase my odds of catching a peacock. Dan found us some clearer water and some aggressive peacocks.
Big props to Dan for being a stand-up dude and putting us on some of these cool fish.
Being fortunate enough to have another generous friend with a boat living in the
Keys who is learning to become a tarpon guide, we drove down to hang out the last few days and to
search for early season poons.
I will summarize this experience by explaining
the big lesson I learned about tarpon on this trip: they hate being in front of
the camera. Here's their top 5 ways of evading digital capture:
1. Not eating
-Especially when the wind is high--like the 15-20 knots on
this trip--the big tarpon don't ride high and play nice. They're hunkered down
with their noses on the sand. They just didn't want to eat. So we did a lot of
this:
2. Hiding under heavy cover
-Sometimes they're there, they're happy, they're rolling and
eating, but you can't get a cast in there. Baby tarpon love the mangroves.
3. Eating at night
-One of the best time to poke a tarpon seems to be at night
where tides funnel water under the many bridges of the Keys. They're happy,
they're within casting range, they're aggressively smashing stuff on the
surface all around you. But it's nighttime, which is a horrible time to try to
take pictures. Your photographer can't find where the fish is until it's
airborne, which only lasts a second and involves blurry acrobatics (see #4
below). You go home with a crappy picture of yourself fighting a fish that made
it 2' from the boat before saying goodbye.
4. Shaking the hook loose
-Tarpon love to jump violently. This means only pro sports
photographers or lucky amateurs can sharply capture their acrobatics. These
jumps quickly result in a freed fish and an airborne fly headed for the boat.
If you get a pic of the fish, it's usually partial, like this:
5. Intimidating anglers so they do stupid things they know
better than to do in this exact situation
Let me just put down the sitch--final fish in a string of
three ~75lbs behind the boat suddenly turns to eat and keeps swimming at me
with it's mouth open until it's 2-5' from the rod tip. The young guide yells,
"SET! SET!"
[There's just no photographing this...]
There's also the far less common "guide gets so excited
by fish in front of boat he accidentally slaps your wife in the face with the
push pole ruining any chance at the fish and busting wife's sunglasses but more
importantly needs to get the first aid kit out." Maybe this is subsumed
under strategy "5" above...
So, sometimes, you fish for more photogenic stuff.
We came home to a parking ticket covered in bird crap and a flooded apartment. Karma.
PS. Our tarpon guide was Jordan Carter, also of Skinny Water Culture. He has been published in 'a Tight Loop' and can be seen in the summer issue of The Drake magazine.
As I write this, I am in the process of packing my bags for an early morning flight to Fort Lauderdale. I'm going to the Miami area for a work trip for the weekend and squeezing in DIY fishing from shore or kayak wherever I can. My wife is coming down to enjoy the sun, beaches, and a few more fish than I can find. We plan on paying a visit to a very fishy dude, too, while I'm in his area. So, let's hope I get a few eats while in the heat. It will be a much-welcomed change of climate at the least (a balmy 30*F here today). Unfortunately it means I'll miss the April Chi-Tie event I've been co-running lately with Dave of Urban Assault Fly Fishing. But it will be my birthday next week, so I'm treating myself to time in Tarponland. Check out Dave's blog in the meantime.
After I got back home, I needed some redemption from Ohio. It wasn't that Steelhead Alley wasn't fun. I just needed to hook, fight, and hold a giant freaking steelhead.
I immediately got in touch with my buddy Scot from Indiana. He has a guide service called The Modern Fly. It had been a few months since we fished together, and we finally had an opportunity. Scot's fishery this time of year is skinny water--tiny creeks that hold steelhead (Spring run and Skamania) and brown trout, as well as floodplains with pre-spawn pike. We thought we'd give it all a try over the course of a day.
Indiana's version of "Drifltess"
To get to the first spot we fished, we walked a quarter mile down some railroad tracks before sliding into a small creek. Scot waded upstream ahead of me, following the shallowest areas and looking in the potholes and troughs for a fish or two. The water had dropped recently, he said, and there were abandoned redds everywhere.
We spotted tails ahead of us, made a few casts around logs, but just spooked the fish out. Finally, a large buck with a beautiful red lateral came shooting around the back of a hole and back up under the laydown at the head. I made a few casts right up onto the tree trunk laying over the fish's head and dropped the lead-eyed streamer down in the hole. I stripped a few times and the line felt funny--I got the chew! Another strip for the hookset and I was putting the cork on one of the biggest steelhead I've caught. Here I was in a few inches of water pulling a 30"+ fish out from under a laydown, using the full 8' of cheap fiberglass Eagle Claw rod to control the aggressive buck.
Scot stood downstream and did a funky monkey dance whenever the fish shot downstream of me so that it would turn back my direction. It takes a true guide and fisherman to do this dance. Trust me.
I was engaged in another dance. The fish wanted to go back under the tree where I had found it. It was a few feet deep but narrow under that tree. Just upstream was a nasty set of snarled roots, branches, and other debris. When the fish headed there, I kept its head up and bear-hugged the tree, passing the rod from under to over the trunk and played the fish back to Scot. He tail-nabbed it and we got a bunch of pics. What a beauty. Fists = bumped.
The spot-hopping continued. We gave the brown trout spots a quick look, but we came up with only a few creek chubs and, oh yea, another steelhead for our efforts. Since the steelbow bite was on, we forewent our plans to get a slam and focused on them instead. I could not believe how skinny of water we were getting these non-spawning early spring steelhead from. I had to stand on the bank, cast downstream, then roll cast back upstream.
The day continued like that. Another spot, a lot of walking and searching, spot a fish, take another shot...
On our way back to the car, Scot spotted another toad of a chromer aggressively defending its hole. Scot gave it a few casts, stripped the fly a few times, and eventually it bit--and we were hooked up and in the rodeo again. I did less funky monkey dancing than Scot when he was in this position, but I corralled the fish away from tree roots with my attempts to capture the fish and the fight on film (er, um, I mean, on digital memory). It was a hot fish, and when we got a look, it was a beauty.
Another fist bump for another early Spring fish released. This Indiana steelheading is way too fun--or at least it was that day. If you're in the area, look Scot up. He knows these waters like we all wish we knew our own.
On my way back to Chicago, I got a much-needed car wash after a weekend on the road. The soap, like the lake-run trout, was rainbow.
So after a weekend chasing steel along the rust belt, I'm a happy angler. With friends or fish, it's good to reconnect. Get out there.
.jpg)
.jpg)
