Last Friday afternoon my friend and I headed east. My head was filled with thoughts of sunshine, floating lines and poppers, all on brand new to me water, and so when we crested the pass and the gloom continued, I’ll be honest and say I was a little disappointed. “If it’s raining in Vantage, it’s raining everywhere,” we said.
It was raining in Vantage. Hard. But, by the time we rolled into the dirt patch we would call home for the next two nights, it slacked off enough to put up the tents dry and watch an amazing sunset build, morph and disappear. Fishing would not be in the cards for our first evening but plenty of fun was had. Enough fun was had, in fact that I rose a little late and the sun was well up by the time I got on the water.
While my pal finished up morning ablutions, I took the canoe out by myself to shake off the cobwebs and hopefully the skunk as well. The skunk would be removed fairly quickly by some small bluegill taking either a small green froggy popper or the trailing mottled green rubber leg nymph, fished off my six weight. When we were both in the canoe I eventually cut off the trailing nymph since this pond is so shallow and weedy and with the two of us in the canoe it is fun to stealthily slink around the pond and hit all those sneaky or more obvious pockets where ditch pickles love to lurk. My 8 weight was loaded with a deer hair mouse pattern and I plopped that thing around to no avail and eventually switched to a weedless black popper, about a size 2. Small to medium small largemouth bass were hitting the black popper with enough regularity to stay confident in it. It seemed like I’d be able to meet my goal for the trip of catching a 2+ pound bass on a popper.
The pond was alive and fish were active. The sky was gorgeous and the sun was warm. There was a little W at times in which case I would stop casting and drive the canoe. I suggested a cast to a certain weedy point which rewarded my friend with a nice hand-sized, dark, male bullheaded bluegill, one of only two good-sized ones we would find. The others were pretty small. We were moving into position to hit a jacuzzi-sized clear patch of black and scuzzy water when we saw a large wake move through it. “Didja see that?! What was THAT?” “Must be a muskrat.” I cast: plop. Short sharp strip: bloop. SPLASH! And bendo…I was glad to have the 8 weight to wrestle this thing out of the weeds.
That was the best fish from that pond and I anticipated actually waking up early to watch the pond wake up the next day, the weather for which was predicted to be mild, calm, and partly cloudy. Perfect fishing weather as far as I was concerned. Another fly angler was sleeping in his van at this pond that night. He warned us of rattlesnakes to which my friend complained later, “I don’t know what it is with rattlesnakes. People say they see them but I never do.” Walking to my tent about 30 minutes later I heard a soft rattle and froze. I spied the back half of a 3-foot rattler crawling into the brush, yelled for my friend and he got to see his rattlesnake. I’d have been just fine not seeing that thing next to my tent because I was a little nervous after that, and definitely cautious about moving around, picking anything up off the ground, or entering or exiting my tent!
The next morning was a beautiful one and the birds were on a whole ‘nother level. Just crazy bird life. I had a coffee and a small bite and hit the pond in the canoe, solo. Not much was happening. I put on a dry damsel and tempted a few small bluegills. I needed another bite so I went in and had one and another coffee. I put some fishing gear in a backpack along with some water, pulled on my knee-high muck boots and headed into the sage to a small pond nearby.
The pond was serene but water quality was pea soup with 1 to 2 inches of visibility so I did not make a cast.
A map review revealed another, larger pond on the other side of where we were camped, this was connected by a surface connection to the weedy pond we’d been fishing. So, I headed there.
This pond had more open water and very few rooted or floating weeds. I approached carefully and put some casts out. Pretty sure I saw a flash under my line on my first cast, and then I saw a huge carp. As I stalked the pond edge, I saw another carp and another. Crusing, sometimes feeding carp. The only fishy interest I got was a couple of med-small bluegills pecking the large bass popper.
Since light was good for spotting the carp, I put on a brown Pat’s Stone I had along and put it in front of several carp. They weren’t interested, and eventually disappeared. Maybe the carp in that pond are keeping the weeds down? It wasn’t deep, or didn’t appear to be. It was too far and too rough a trail to want to bother trying to get the canoe in there so I let it be and headed to camp to break it down and hit another lake, this time in search of smallmouth.
The weather was fair and pretty calm and it just seemed like a fishy day. Folks at this rockier lake were mostly targeting walleye, it seemed, and the other craft on the water ranged from our canoe, to a Clackacraft with a big trolling motor, to a number of motorboats of varying sizes and finishes, from dull tin boats to Xtreme Wakeboarding Graffix. We were definitely the smallest craft out there but perfectly suited to stalking the shallows, as was the plan.
For this session I knotted on a large white popper with red and yellow details, about a 1/0 I’d guess, with no weed guard. We headed to the far shore which was vegetated and started casting and drifting and paddling down the bank. I was fishing a little faster here, longer casts, generally faster popping and covering more water, less precision casting to small openings but occasionally targeting a submerged rock with a dark ledge or other fishy features. We were floating in about 8-2 feet of water with boulders and rocks and interspersed weeds and it seemed right, and it was right because without too much delay we started getting hits on our poppers. It took a few fish but I finally got the timing right and started hooking and landing smallmouth.
end of part 1
It was raining in Vantage. Hard. But, by the time we rolled into the dirt patch we would call home for the next two nights, it slacked off enough to put up the tents dry and watch an amazing sunset build, morph and disappear. Fishing would not be in the cards for our first evening but plenty of fun was had. Enough fun was had, in fact that I rose a little late and the sun was well up by the time I got on the water.
While my pal finished up morning ablutions, I took the canoe out by myself to shake off the cobwebs and hopefully the skunk as well. The skunk would be removed fairly quickly by some small bluegill taking either a small green froggy popper or the trailing mottled green rubber leg nymph, fished off my six weight. When we were both in the canoe I eventually cut off the trailing nymph since this pond is so shallow and weedy and with the two of us in the canoe it is fun to stealthily slink around the pond and hit all those sneaky or more obvious pockets where ditch pickles love to lurk. My 8 weight was loaded with a deer hair mouse pattern and I plopped that thing around to no avail and eventually switched to a weedless black popper, about a size 2. Small to medium small largemouth bass were hitting the black popper with enough regularity to stay confident in it. It seemed like I’d be able to meet my goal for the trip of catching a 2+ pound bass on a popper.
The pond was alive and fish were active. The sky was gorgeous and the sun was warm. There was a little W at times in which case I would stop casting and drive the canoe. I suggested a cast to a certain weedy point which rewarded my friend with a nice hand-sized, dark, male bullheaded bluegill, one of only two good-sized ones we would find. The others were pretty small. We were moving into position to hit a jacuzzi-sized clear patch of black and scuzzy water when we saw a large wake move through it. “Didja see that?! What was THAT?” “Must be a muskrat.” I cast: plop. Short sharp strip: bloop. SPLASH! And bendo…I was glad to have the 8 weight to wrestle this thing out of the weeds.
That was the best fish from that pond and I anticipated actually waking up early to watch the pond wake up the next day, the weather for which was predicted to be mild, calm, and partly cloudy. Perfect fishing weather as far as I was concerned. Another fly angler was sleeping in his van at this pond that night. He warned us of rattlesnakes to which my friend complained later, “I don’t know what it is with rattlesnakes. People say they see them but I never do.” Walking to my tent about 30 minutes later I heard a soft rattle and froze. I spied the back half of a 3-foot rattler crawling into the brush, yelled for my friend and he got to see his rattlesnake. I’d have been just fine not seeing that thing next to my tent because I was a little nervous after that, and definitely cautious about moving around, picking anything up off the ground, or entering or exiting my tent!
The next morning was a beautiful one and the birds were on a whole ‘nother level. Just crazy bird life. I had a coffee and a small bite and hit the pond in the canoe, solo. Not much was happening. I put on a dry damsel and tempted a few small bluegills. I needed another bite so I went in and had one and another coffee. I put some fishing gear in a backpack along with some water, pulled on my knee-high muck boots and headed into the sage to a small pond nearby.
The pond was serene but water quality was pea soup with 1 to 2 inches of visibility so I did not make a cast.
A map review revealed another, larger pond on the other side of where we were camped, this was connected by a surface connection to the weedy pond we’d been fishing. So, I headed there.
This pond had more open water and very few rooted or floating weeds. I approached carefully and put some casts out. Pretty sure I saw a flash under my line on my first cast, and then I saw a huge carp. As I stalked the pond edge, I saw another carp and another. Crusing, sometimes feeding carp. The only fishy interest I got was a couple of med-small bluegills pecking the large bass popper.
Since light was good for spotting the carp, I put on a brown Pat’s Stone I had along and put it in front of several carp. They weren’t interested, and eventually disappeared. Maybe the carp in that pond are keeping the weeds down? It wasn’t deep, or didn’t appear to be. It was too far and too rough a trail to want to bother trying to get the canoe in there so I let it be and headed to camp to break it down and hit another lake, this time in search of smallmouth.
The weather was fair and pretty calm and it just seemed like a fishy day. Folks at this rockier lake were mostly targeting walleye, it seemed, and the other craft on the water ranged from our canoe, to a Clackacraft with a big trolling motor, to a number of motorboats of varying sizes and finishes, from dull tin boats to Xtreme Wakeboarding Graffix. We were definitely the smallest craft out there but perfectly suited to stalking the shallows, as was the plan.
For this session I knotted on a large white popper with red and yellow details, about a 1/0 I’d guess, with no weed guard. We headed to the far shore which was vegetated and started casting and drifting and paddling down the bank. I was fishing a little faster here, longer casts, generally faster popping and covering more water, less precision casting to small openings but occasionally targeting a submerged rock with a dark ledge or other fishy features. We were floating in about 8-2 feet of water with boulders and rocks and interspersed weeds and it seemed right, and it was right because without too much delay we started getting hits on our poppers. It took a few fish but I finally got the timing right and started hooking and landing smallmouth.
end of part 1
