Trout, Bass, Fireflies And A West Texan At The Power Lines

First, I think Ian James is onto something.

Second, had a great evening on the Grand River near Fergus this evening. This was a portion of the river I had never fished before, so it took me a few minutes of reconnasaince to figure out where I wanted to place myself in the river. There were a few folks fishing upstream of where I had entered, and one fellow about 150 yards downstream. I decided to fish some nice riffle water, with some deeper pools through it, along with some still water within casting distance across.

It was a beautiful evening, part cloud, part sun and mild temperatures – but interestingly, there were no hatches of anything going on to speak of. I think the whole evening I saw a total of ten fish rising – so I decided to tie on a wet fly pattern. Now, once again, because of the upcoming Canadian Fly Fishing Championships, upon agreement with my teammates, I’m not at liberty to say what patterns I used until after the competition has been completed. But I must have been lucky in my hunch this evening, as I stuck with one pattern just about the entire time, and was quite successful.

In fact, I caught my first fish on the fourth cast. A nice 12 incher. I lost a few more, caught a few more – and ended up bringing about a dozen browns to hand on the one fly – the largest being about 16 inches, and the smallest, 10 inches.

I also had one monster on that broke my 4 lb. test leader. This guy was BIG. My TCO rod was bent right over, and line was slipping through my fingers as I fought it. Then all of a sudden, Snap! Sheesh.

No idea what the fish was – it could have been a big brown, but I was told there are also some carp in that area – but with the particular pattern I was fishing, I doubt it was a carp. It could have been a big bass though as later on, I did hook a smallmouth but lost it. As I was bringing it in, it did a nice little tail dance for me on top of the water, and it was a green smallie, no doubt, about 14 inches or so. After the tail dance, it dove to the bottom and shook the fly.

I decided to wade a little further downstream and have a chat with the angler who was fishing a pool about 75 yards away. Turns out his name is Josh Rienhardt, visiting Ontario from West Texas. A fine fly angler he is too. I had some time to admire his casting skills before chatting with him. Josh shared some of his experiences over the past few days with me, and I shared some stuff, under the threat of disembowlment if he let out what I was using to anyone who might be competing in the championships this weekend. It was nice to meet him, and talk about fly fishing in general, and our own favorite waters specifically. Hope to see you again on the river sometime, Josh!
Just before dark, I decided to switch flies, just to experiment and test something out, and sure enough, two more nice browns, both about 12 inches were caught and released. I wanted to fish longer, but by this time, the sun had completely gone down below the horizon and I was in darkness. As I waded back to the path along the side of the river, a favorite sight of mine – fireflies! I love seeing fireflies at night, and there were hundreds of them, flashing their little bums green.

Did you know that fireflies flash their bums with that little light because they are looking to attract a mate? I sometimes wonder what it would be like if humans, when they were ummm… aroused, had their bums flash…

Might make things easier at the singles bars, huh? Well, I’d prefer to be fly fishing myself than hangin’ out at the singles’s bars anyhow. And now, I’m going to tie up some more flies and hopefully convince some of my team members to give them a try during the competition. I think they might be surprised!