Oh, yeah! Been doing a lot of stillwater fishing lately and really miss the moving water part of the obsession…
Mostly modest size smallies, but scrappy fun on a 3 wt and the perfect combination of low water and easy current to fish light tackle in.
One oddity, no idea on the blunted head thing, probably an injury of some sort early in life. Funny looking fish, but as healthy and strong as they get for the size.
Longear, Rock bass, and chub galore added near constant action.
Here and there, the “other bass” made a showing. I’m gonna say Spotted Bass due to the cheek scaling and other attributes in all of them.
Fish were tight to cover and spooky in low clear water, the low diameter line and light tackle meshed perfectly with creek conditions. Saw a few spookers, snuck in slow with the camera held underwater, and shot away at different angles. Got one! Sneaky MFers, too…they just let ya walk right on by without moving.
Most of the day was on a couple/three flies. Weighted, dull paint and coated to avoid chinking on gravel for sucker fishing. They worked pretty darn good for everything else, too. I think I’m making progress on the Redhorse/carp fly idea by getting them quiet and using some form of fiber or feather to “shroud” the shiny parts of the fly. The idea for sucker fishing was to have a fly heavy enough to get down, yet look like a potentially small and easy meal. Made the chassis look like a mossy pebble with a soft chamois worm/leech/larva attached to it. The bass likely take it as one individual, multi-colored critter to snack on. My local Redhorse, OTOH, tend to assess and often pass/fail flies based on overall perceived size. For example, two flies the same size, one all brown (or all red) and the other half brown and half red...they'll usually grab the two tone. I
think it looks smaller and more feasible to their eyes and they judge this based on the part they wish to eat.
Sounds insanely stupid, but **** if it don't work consistently in my creeks. Big enough to sink and fish slower, obvious enough to get noticed, yet upon inspection look
very unlike one big creature. I've done this with 3-4 colors or components to "break-up" a sucker fly so the edible or attractive part will look relatively small.
It worked quite well for some chunky Goldens….