When The Usual Doesn’t Work, Try Something Different

It was a beautiful evening and I stopped by the ponds on my way back from Bass Pro Shop. The 6th of August is “the wee man’s” 7th birthday, and I thought I’d head down there to see what I could pick up for him.

I pulled into the laneway at about 6:20PM, and no one else was there. I had the place to myself except for the odd osprey, a bunch of turtles sunning themselves, and a bunch of ducks.  I headed over to the long dock and wondered what to tie on. There was no surface activity whatsoever, and I figured I might as well try the black rabbit strip leach pattern that yesterday evening, I’d had a couple of good hits on.  I cast to various spots, and using a variety of retrieves, half an hour later not even a hit.  So I went to white wooly buggers and my “malteser” that has so often caught me fish when nothing else will.

With the cool weather we’ve been having, I didn’t think the trout would be needing to go down to the bottom to escape the heat. As well, one fellow I met up with yesterday said he had his fish finder out with him and said that all the fish were within two feet of the surface. With that in mind, I kept the spool of Sixth Sense slow intermediate line on and decided to experiment mostly with different retrieves – and flies of course.

After trying a variety of nymphs and then the chironomid pattern that often works, and not a single hit, I was wondering what next to try. I finally settled on a #8 Orange Crystal Wooly Bugger, tied up by Arran Varga.  He had given me a few a couple of years ago, and I don’t often use them.   Well tonight, that was just the ticket, on a very slow retrieve. It was getting on to almost 8PM when I tied it on and cast it out.  About the third cast… ah that nice feeling of a solid hook up! Not one of the bigger fish in the pond at about 16 inches, but it was brought to the net.  Nice size for the frying pan.

Two casts later on exactly the same retrieve – a sort of ‘short strip, short strip – pause’ – just after the pause, another fish on! This one turned out to be even smaller than the first one at 14″ – but still fun nonetheless.   Seems maybe this evening, orange crystal wooley buggers were what the doctor ordered, and sure enough, in the next 10 to 15 minutes, two more trout, these ones about 20 and 22 inches respectively were brought to the net and then released.   All on the same sort of slow, jerky retrieve and each one of them attacked the fly after the pause in the retrieve.

About that time, an almost full moon had begun rising in the sky and as the sun started to dip in the west, so did the temperature, down to about 16C. I was pretty excited about the 4 fish in about half an hour and called my best friend to share that excitement with! What did we do before we had cell phones that worked almost everywhere? It’s just too bad Colleen couldn’t have been there as even with the temperatures cooling off, it was a beautiful evening with that big old moon hanging in the sky.

While talking to her, I did a few roll casts of about 20 feet of line and my 10 foot leader and just used my rod to bring the line back towards where I was standing. I wasn’t really paying attention – and what do you know! If I had been paying attention, I would have had five rainbow trout landed this evening in under and 3/4 of hour, on a fly I’d seldom ever try.

Just goes to show you – if at first you don’t succeed, try try again – and try something a bit different.