We also did fun stuff like smoking ribs and chicken, burning shit and blowing shit up, and 4-wheeling the fire/timber roads in my friend’s side-by-side followed by my other friend in his rental Jeep Gladiator pickup. I have to say, we were impressed with what that thing did with stock touring Bridgestones! He said the rental guy just looked at him and laughed when he went to drop it off. Mostly it was great to spend time with old friends. We all met in high school; they were close when I moved to a new town the summer before my senior year, and they sort of adopted me. We have stayed in touch even as life spread us all across the country, but it had been six years since the last time we all got to hang. We agreed it won’t be so long next time and we are already making plans, even though we all have plenty of other obligations, we need to and will make time, because this is some of the good stuff in life.
The second half of my trip was a quick 2-night family hang, mostly at my dad’s lake “cabin” in NW SC, fishing with my brother from a canoe. The lake was gorgeous with the Mountain Laurel in bloom, a few Rhododendrons still hanging on to purple blooms as well. We saw bream and bass beds in various places, but only a couple small fish on beds. Down at the dam, I had a great quick session from land with a chartreuse worm; bass were stacked in the transition water from shallow to deep off the dam face. Pre-spawn, hanging off the beds maybe? Or maybe just spooked off the beds? It was here that I saw the largest bass I’ve ever seen in real life. It looked like a Labrador Retriever. It swam up to the outlet, circled the square pipe, and was staring at me. We stared at each other, as it wiggled its fins. Of course, I dropped the worm in front of it, almost dapping it, and of course, it did not bite my lure. But that fish is there! There are at least a few good-sized bass in there. We’ve seen ‘em occasionally. However, there don’t seem to be many. Mostly we catch 1 and 2 pounders, which are fun, but we want to catch bigger bass--duh. Some of the lake homeowners paid a wildlife/fisheries management company to survey the lake and make recommendations. One of the recommendations was to cull the small bass. We did our duty on that part and had a nice pile of bass filets after a few fishing sessions.
Mostly, I fly fished, except when the wind came up the one full day we had, at which point fly fishing from a canoe was really tough. So that’s when we took a break, drove to a couple shore spots, I cast a spin rod with a weedless worm, etc. I concentrated on popper fishing, but also took one bass on a Sparkle Minnow-ish streamer from Squatchin’ which looks a lot like a sunfish. I also had a big grab on that fly but did not hook up. I dropped a hare’s ear nymph off the smaller popper I fished and that took some pretty nice big bull Bluegill, but the bream fishing was a little slow compared to years past (maybe that’s why they infused it with 7500 juvenile Bluegill), so eventually I just fished big poppers for bass, and I got some. Nothing big, but fun. I want to figure out how to get those bigguns. That’s sort of hard to do from 2,000 miles away, however.
We spotted clouds of tiny fry (recent hatchlings?) and encountered and saw many many juvenile sunfish, ranging from say 1.5 to 3 inches. They were everywhere. Several managed to fit the hare’s ear into their mouths. I also blame them for our lack of success on the ol’ bait rods for catfish set out at night. Inevitably our baits would be nibbled off the hook. So no catfish. No Redear Sunfish aka Shellcracker encountered this trip, either. I hope they don’t get swamped by the Bluegill. I really like those big Shellcracker. We saw a bunch of the grass carp put in the lake to keep the weeds down. Some of them are longer than my leg. Of course I cast to them with bass and bream poppers and like the big mama bass at the dam, of course they also did not bite the flies. My other brother has asked me to tie him some grass carp flies. It could be a new frontier for us!
The second half of my trip was a quick 2-night family hang, mostly at my dad’s lake “cabin” in NW SC, fishing with my brother from a canoe. The lake was gorgeous with the Mountain Laurel in bloom, a few Rhododendrons still hanging on to purple blooms as well. We saw bream and bass beds in various places, but only a couple small fish on beds. Down at the dam, I had a great quick session from land with a chartreuse worm; bass were stacked in the transition water from shallow to deep off the dam face. Pre-spawn, hanging off the beds maybe? Or maybe just spooked off the beds? It was here that I saw the largest bass I’ve ever seen in real life. It looked like a Labrador Retriever. It swam up to the outlet, circled the square pipe, and was staring at me. We stared at each other, as it wiggled its fins. Of course, I dropped the worm in front of it, almost dapping it, and of course, it did not bite my lure. But that fish is there! There are at least a few good-sized bass in there. We’ve seen ‘em occasionally. However, there don’t seem to be many. Mostly we catch 1 and 2 pounders, which are fun, but we want to catch bigger bass--duh. Some of the lake homeowners paid a wildlife/fisheries management company to survey the lake and make recommendations. One of the recommendations was to cull the small bass. We did our duty on that part and had a nice pile of bass filets after a few fishing sessions.
Mostly, I fly fished, except when the wind came up the one full day we had, at which point fly fishing from a canoe was really tough. So that’s when we took a break, drove to a couple shore spots, I cast a spin rod with a weedless worm, etc. I concentrated on popper fishing, but also took one bass on a Sparkle Minnow-ish streamer from Squatchin’ which looks a lot like a sunfish. I also had a big grab on that fly but did not hook up. I dropped a hare’s ear nymph off the smaller popper I fished and that took some pretty nice big bull Bluegill, but the bream fishing was a little slow compared to years past (maybe that’s why they infused it with 7500 juvenile Bluegill), so eventually I just fished big poppers for bass, and I got some. Nothing big, but fun. I want to figure out how to get those bigguns. That’s sort of hard to do from 2,000 miles away, however.
We spotted clouds of tiny fry (recent hatchlings?) and encountered and saw many many juvenile sunfish, ranging from say 1.5 to 3 inches. They were everywhere. Several managed to fit the hare’s ear into their mouths. I also blame them for our lack of success on the ol’ bait rods for catfish set out at night. Inevitably our baits would be nibbled off the hook. So no catfish. No Redear Sunfish aka Shellcracker encountered this trip, either. I hope they don’t get swamped by the Bluegill. I really like those big Shellcracker. We saw a bunch of the grass carp put in the lake to keep the weeds down. Some of them are longer than my leg. Of course I cast to them with bass and bream poppers and like the big mama bass at the dam, of course they also did not bite the flies. My other brother has asked me to tie him some grass carp flies. It could be a new frontier for us!
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