Tailing Caprs

[Buzzy]

Picture perfect weather for capr fishing: no clouds, no "W", no smoke. And a fair number of caprs on the flats and sometimes visible in deeper water.

I was waiting for a buddy to show up so I started fishing right from the "launch" and thankfully, on my third, not my first, cast I hooked and landed a capr. The first of seven fair hooked fish to the net. This is what I started out with:



Size 8 shrimp hook - I hooked four fish with this fly before I started getting refusals. I did manage to bring a scale back when I set on a fish that I though ate. It didn't.

The no "W" changed with a slight breeze from the south - I need to figure out a way to slow my pram down when I'm wind drifting. There were lots of tailing fish today but with the wind blowing me down lake, I didn't have much time to make a cast or adjust a cast before I was too close to the fish. One fish seemed oblivious to my pram - he was busy digging in the silt. I dropped my fly right in front of the fish, he saw the fly, lifted is snout out of the muck and sucked the fly in, chomp, chomp. I strip-set but pulled the fly right out its mouth. That was fun, the visual is such a gas.



I changed to a size 10 hybrid with dubbed body rather than the typical cactus chenile:





Fun day - not too many capr days left this year.

 

[skyriver]

Nice capr day!

 

[Zak]

I had an interesting capr experience today. I was out on the dock in the afternoon and about 40 feet away in deep water I see what looks like 3 smallish fish cruising around in a tight pattern sipping bugs. I can't see the fish, just the wakes in the water. I cast a bass bug over there and KERPLOOSH a huge fish flips and dives. It must have been one of the grass carp sipping bugs (or maybe, I don't know, specks of algae?) through the film. Now I'm wondering if I can catch one on an emerger. That would be a rodeo on my light tackle!

 

[Buzzy]

I had an interesting capr experience today. I was out on the dock in the afternoon and about 40 feet away in deep water I see what looks like 3 smallish fish cruising around in a tight pattern sipping bugs. I can't see the fish, just the wakes in the water. I cast a bass bug over there and KERPLOOSH a huge fish flips and dives. It must have been one of the grass carp sipping bugs (or maybe, I don't know, specks of algae?) through the film. Now I'm wondering if I can catch one on an emerger. That would be a rodeo on my light tackle!

Oh man, a capr on a dry fly? I saw one clooping schmoots last week but I didn't have a schmoots pattern with me (there's a whole new fly box needed to match that hatch; you know - rotting willow moss in size 16, milfoil petals in nymph and dry fly patterns, the list is endless) and I spooked it with my first cast. Good luck going down this path! Grass carp, huh!

Seriously though, a friend of mine in Spokane told me stories of carp keying to a mayfly hatch on one of his zipper lip lakes in the area. He targeted carp during the hatch. Please keep us posted!

 

[Jim F.]

stories of carp keying to a mayfly hatch

That's how I got started 5+ decades ago. I was fishing a Mayfly hatch on an old oxbow slough when I saw what I thought was another nbig Brown slurping fallen spinners. I cast, it slurped and so it began. The capr was hooked & I was hooked even deeper. I caught 1 more until they vacated that stretch of free-flowing slough.

I have hooked capr here on occasion on Mulberry dry patterns & also on Cottonwood tree "fluff" flies, but clooping fish where I spent most of my time were not a common occurance.