Islamorada Tarpon on the Feed

From the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Garden and Gun, a little contrast to all those trout-sipping-mayflies videos.

No Trash Fish

If I had a dollar for every time I read something about jacks being underrated, I could afford to go permit fishing. The sheer number of this type of article leads me to believe that jacks aren't as underappreciated as the authors would like us to believe. What it tells me is that these are the fish we're not supposed to like, but do anyway.

Jacks, of course, are related to permit, but they're like the cousins no one wants to admit they have -- rough around the edges, unrefined, too quick to pick a fight. These are the same qualities, however, that make them more fun to hang out with.

Such is the case with the jack crevalle. I don't target them specifically, mainly because they tend to move around, and they do it quickly, especially when they're on the feed. When they stick around someplace, like they did one day I fished a power plant outflow on a chilly winter morning a few years back, the action can be great. That day, I caught medium-sized jacks on a topwater plug until they had straightened all the trebles.

Usually, I catch them on accident, but there have been many times when a jack has shown up to save an otherwise slow day, most of the time pulling harder than whatever fish I was trying to catch in the first place (there really aren't too many fish out there that are stronger, pound for pound). This happened only last Saturday, when the remnants of a mini cold front was passing through, and the wind was whipping me around the bayou I usually fish. The flats on the outside were simply impossible. Paddling was hard. Casting was hard. And the fish must have been hunkered down, riding it out like I should have been, but when you have an allotted time to fish, you take it.

Before my time was up, the tide turned around and started to come in. Mullet schools rode the incoming, and it looked like some of the smaller ones, maybe, were getting picked off by predators. On one of my final casts, I hooked a small jack that gave me a nice little fight before I let it go. That fish made my day, and I appreciated it plenty.

My guess is that jacks have a bigger fan club than people would have you believe, it's just that no one wants to admit it.

Screw a One-Horse Open Sleigh (Bull-Sharking from a Kayak)

Admittedly, not fly fishing, but this looks like fun. The only question I have is wouldn't it be more sporting from a paddleboard? Skip to about 4:20 for the good stuff.

Crazy Paddleboard Fishing

I think this guy from the SWC blog might be my new hero.

Chris Lewis "Long Paddle"



Long Paddle from Chris Lewis on Vimeo.

Gar Quest Part 1

In my freshwater sojourns as of late, I haven't had as much luck with the bass, and I've been eschewing the bluegill entirely. I have, however, discovered that the place where I've been fishing has a healthy population of gar.

Just for fun, I've been casting at them with my bass popper. It's always enjoyable to target a fish, present a fly, and entice a bite, but with gar, the problem is setting the hook. It's not hard to get a gar to bite. With their armored scales and their mouthful of teeth, they don't have much to worry about (aside from the occasional hungry gator), so they don't spook too easily, and they seem to have the attitude that if something is moving, it must be food. I tried different hooksetting techniques with each gar to take the popper, ranging from a hard strip strike (teeth cut the line) to a gentle trout set (fish stayed on for a few seconds until it realized all it had to do was open its mouth).

All of this has resulted in a new determination to catch one of these fish on fly. The generally agreed-upon strategy is to use a fly that will entangle the gar's teeth. I'm sure this is frowned upon by purists, but so are gar, so I figure what the hell, I'll give it a try. I've tied up a few flies with EP fiber and a few with an old gar standby -- nylon rope. These are ugly flies, but like I said, the gar seem not to be too discerning, so they'll probably be shredded in short order.

Now all I have to do is get out there and catch one of these swamp creatures so I can get back to the salt.

To be continued...

Becoming a Bass Master

I've only had a few hours here and there to fish lately, and instead of loading the car with the paddleboard and all its accoutrements, I've been hitting the freshwater with the 4-weight, doing some bank fishing.

When I see the bass tournaments on TV, I turn the channel. There's just something that turns me off about the sparkly, sponsorship-emblazoned water rockets swarming around the lake, carrying bass pros that yank three-pound fish into their boats with 50-pound test to store them in a live well until they're weighed at the end of the day. That's the vision I have of bass fishing, a prejudice that lets an entire fishery slip from my consciousness for years at a time.

But since I've been dipping my toe in the freshwater as of late, I've had the chance to discover that I really like fishing for bass. It's like a latent primordial redneck has arisen within me that has lain dormant, waiting to be baptized in the blackwater gator hole from whence he came -- except this one uses a fly rod rather than a flippin' stick. Snook, my regular quarry, grow larger and stronger than a largemouth. They swim faster and jump higher. But there's something to be said for the suddenness of a bass striking a topwater fly. That strike is quick and full of malevolence, no matter the size of the fish, and at least where I've been fishing, it comes from nowhere. The fly is bobbing on the surface, and then it's annihilated. Fly fishing for largemouth bass could be described as periods of stillness interrupted by sudden violence. And it's a lot of fun. One of these days I'll commit for real and tie up some big hair bugs, put the paddleboard on a lake, and sling the 8-weight in search of a hawg.

My rewards for hitting 8-inch holes in the duckweed from 15 feet:

Is It Fall Yet? (with Sharks)

When I left my house to go fishing Sunday morning, the thermometer in my rearview mirror read 69, which was the first time I'd seen the 60s in months. I knew I was headed to a flat where I might find some redfish, and my hopes were that they'd be starting to school up with the cooler weather and water temperatures. No such luck. I drifted and paddled across a couple miles of flats, picking up only a sea trout and a mangrove snapper (not counting one overly aggressive pinfish).

I did see three reds, but not before they managed to see me. A sheepshead ignored about four casts before deciding to swim away. Overall, not much action. That is, until I turn a corner into a bay, across which I was supposed to meet my family for lunch. Here, schools of mullet and other baitfish were being harassed by predator fish, including a three-foot bonnethead and a five-foot blacktip. The blacktip was remaining pretty visible, and I had to decide whether to cast at him with the 20-pound mono leader on my rod or just turn on the GoPro and try to catch him that way. I was already late for lunch, so I chose the latter. Keep in mind, objects in GoPro are closer than they appear.

The Littlest Largemouth

Still, not bad on a 4-weight with 6x tippet.

Carolina Dreaming

Florida summers are hot. There’s no escaping it. It’s hot in the morning, hot in the evening, blazing hot in the afternoon, and slightly less hot in the middle of the night. The  weather warms in April and doesn’t let up until October or November. So despite loving the fishing down here, there are times, in the midst of this endless summer, when I find myself yearning to be up high up some cold mountain trickle dapping for colorful little wild brookies. 

It would be a long drive up to North Carolina to get anything like that, so I turn to the next best thing: bluegill. While we have no mountains and the temperature can’t be helped, at least I can fish for colorful little freshwater fish with my 4-weight and flies that look like bugs.  

This morning I had that freshwater feeling, so I dug out some hoppers and nymphs from my last trout fishing excursion a couple years ago, knocked the rust off the 4-weight, and headed out. I probably drove past a hundred retention ponds full of bluegill to get somewhere a little more natural -- a slow-moving blackwater creek flowing through a nearby park. It’s not exactly wild, but it’s a pretty close approximation for its location in the middle of a metropolitan area, and Fish and Wildlife did recently pull a wayward 11-foot, 700-pound crocodile out of the lake that feeds the creek. They released it 300 miles away, where it was born, near Key Largo, I guess so it wouldn’t have a bad influence on our local alligators.

I strung up my rod, tied on one of the hoppers, and on my third cast, a bluegill slurped it down with a smacking kiss. I brought it in and let it go, thinking that I would have a couple hours of fun with the little fish on surface flies. I was mistaken. I had not another bite the entire morning. I switched flies. I tried fishing on the surface, under the surface, tight to the bank, in deeper water, in the sun, in the shade, and couldn’t buy another look. So after an hour or so, when I snapped off a fly on a DO NOT FEED OR MOLEST the alligators sign, I reeled it in and drove home. But I guess I got what I was looking for after all -- the bluegill doing their best trout imitation by turning selective and tough to catch.

Cast and Repeat

The water hisses against the underside of my SUP as I paddle across a small saltwater lake, connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a short creek that cuts underneath an impassable tangle of mangroves. The clouds hang low in the sky, purple and swollen with rain that has yet to fall. I feel their weight somewhere deep within my consciousness and kneel as I strip line from my reel. From my knees I lift the line into the air, casting sidearm toward a hole in the shoreline, a shadowed cave where the snook of my imagination dwells, a thick beast of a fish hovering near the bottom, finning slowly against the tide, growing with each false cast until I let the line go and send my fly to its fate.

I strip the line through my fingers, waiting for the fly, an abstract foam and feather shrimp imitation that I had lovingly tied only hours before, to be engulfed, to be sucked into the raspy maw of a backcountry leviathan. Strip. strip. strip. The fly pops on the surface. Rain begins to drizzle, pattering on the brim of my hat. Strip. strip. strip. The fly is moving farther from the edge, out of the strike zone. Nothing.

I repeat the exercise again and again, dissecting the shoreline. With each cast, hope ebbs and wanes, until a fish strikes. Not the snook that’s been swimming in my head, but a snook. It takes the fly just as I’m about to lift my line from the water once again, a pleasant surprise, but overmatched by my eight-weight rod. It jumps two times, shaking its head and cartwheeling back into the water. The fight is over quickly, and I slide the fish into my hand, maybe fifteen inches long, warm like the water, like the air, like me. 

It happens like this three more times this evening -- two snook and a chunky mangrove snapper that fought bigger than it was. Thunder sounds in the distance, and I reel in my line, hook my fly in the stripping guide of my rod, and paddle back across the lake, water hissing softly underneath me.