Friday afternoon was pretty typical. School ended, I got a few things ready for my
classes on Monday, and I left school with the intention of picking up pizza on
my way home. This is so much of a usual
routine that the folks at the pizza joint I order from know me by name and
expect to see me on Fridays. The only
difference in this routine was that I was running a little ahead of schedule
and had about 15 minutes to stop by a fishing spot. I had been prospecting at Blue Springs Lake
dam for about the last month and trying to see if the hybrids (wipers) and/or
white bass were moving into the dam to feed.
I had been throwing flies off the dam for a few hours each weekend and
hadn’t gotten a sniff yet. I found out
about this pattern a few years ago from Luke Langton. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, then I
HIGHLY suggest that you visit The Midwest Drift website. Luke runs the site and does everything from
writing a blog, to small batch fly orders, to guided bass trips on private
water. Luke turned me on to this spot
about 2 or 3 years ago when we were shooting the breeze at an Iron Fly event in
Kansas City.
So there I was, with 15 minutes to prospect on the dam with
the hopes of finding some fish moving in towards the boulders. My gear was about as simple and minimal as
possible. I had a 8 weight rod with a 6
foot fluorocarbon leader, and an articulated streamer. I call it “The Chief” because it is just a
bigger version of “The Brave”. That’s it. No extra flies. No additional leader. None of my usual tools. I hadn’t caught squat off the dam so far this
year and had 15 minutes to not catch anything again. Why would I need any of that extra junk?
I was about 10 minutes into my casting practice. That’s what I call it when I’m not getting
bites and I start having little casting contests against myself. I start wondering, “I wonder if I can throw 5
feet further? I wonder how close I can
get to that rock? I wonder how much line
I can shoot with this leader, fly, and rod set-up? You get the idea. As I was reaching my casting distance max, I
started varying my retrieves so I guess you can say I was doing more than just
going through the motions. That’s when I
felt a bump.
I was so surprised by it, I didn’t really know what to do so
I set the hook a little late and a little light. I felt pretty certain that I had just my fly
sink too deep and I had hit a rock. I
thought this because I had two extremely sharp hooks on my fly and felt pretty
certain that a real hit would have almost hooked itself. It was at that point I decided that I was
going to either lose my fly on a rock or end up hooking a fish. I cast back to the same spot. Same result.
I cast back to the same spot for a third time and this time set the hook
in a different manner. Rather than
setting the hook with the rod only, I pulled hard on the line to bring it tight
and THEN set the hook with the rod. I
believe this is called a strike-slip. I
am certain however, that it worked. I
was hooked up with an actual fish and it was NOT happy.
The unseen specter was into my backing in no time. I could feel the head shakes at the end of
the run and that seemed to eliminate a large catfish so I figured I had tied
into a good sized wiper. I had only done
this on one other occasion and the fish that I landed ended up being 25 inches
long and weighing right at 8 pounds. My
hope was that this fish was similar. We
fought for about 10 minutes and it was very much a tug of war match. I would gain ground, it would run to open
water in front of me, I would gain ground, it would run to open water on my
left, etc. I could feel the fight was coming to an end and I started to look
around to see if anyone was around to take a picture of me with my catch. As luck would have it, two young girls that
looked to be about 15 we walking along the dam and headed in my direction. When I hollered at them and asked if they
could take a picture for me, they were really interested and happy to oblige. While I didn’t have a scale or measuring
tape, the pictures show that the fish was around 25 inches long and probably
weighed about 8 pounds. All I could
think was “I can’t believe this.
Lightning has struck twice.” I
could not have been more wrong.
More to come tomorrow!
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