Fishing 16 December 2011

Today was a public holiday in SA and I managed to sneak off to the streams for some fishing. We had some hard rain in the week and even had some reports of some snow on the mountain early in the week. It is supposed to be high summer and we have had snow!!! The rain made the river flow a little higher than what is normal for this time of year but at least it will let us fish for longer into the summer. The weather today was absolutely perfect and the fish though so to. There was no hatches that I could see and I also didn't see any fish rising, but all 20 odd rainbow's I caught today was caught on a dry fly.

With the high flows I got snapped off 3 times when a fish ran downstream and I could not follow it fast enough. I was fishing with 8X tippet as I forgot my 5x and 6x tippet at home. When I reached to top of my beat I turned around and had some fun catching small mouth bass with streamers on the way downstream.

I also decided to clean my tying desk today. I normally sit down and tie one or two flies and always end up either sticking the flies in whatever piece of foam or box that is close by. Well, apparently I have been tying a lot more than I though as I found a crap load of flies all over the place.

Bassing around

I ventured out for a few hours to go fishing for some bass at our local dam today. I started out with some poppers and the smaller fish were hitting the poppers all the time. It really was fun targeting individual fish and then to see a few small bass all storm at the fly as soon as it lands. The bigger fish would however just swim up to the fly and inspect it  for a few minutes before it would turn up it nose and swim away.

 

FRUSTRATING and yes I was sitting in the tree trying to get this guy to take my fly

It's just not going to happen

Eventually I had enough of the smaller fish and set out to get my revenge on some of the larger fish. I tied on a fish skull streamer and low and behold on the fist cast one of the larger fish chased it as if possessed and  I watched it as it opened its mouth and swallowed the fly. I was a bit quick on the gun though and pulled the fly out of its mouth. I few choice words and two casts later another fish chased the fly and it was fish on.

My arm just wasn't long enough to get the whole fish in the pic. :-)

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the Fish Skull fly was as it landed me quite a few decent sized bass.

Happy but tired little soldier

OOPS, hero shot gone wrong

Camping and fishing

Firstly I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and had the opportunity to spend some quality time with family and friends. The reason for my late Christmas wishes is that I did get to spend to quality time with my family as well as managed to get some good Bass fishing in at the same time.

We packed up the dogs and the tent on Friday afternoon and drove about 2 hours to a  farm next to the Breede river to spend the weekend. We arrived a little bit late on Friday afternoon and after pitching the tents we cracked some beers and sat around the fire talking nonsense.

Our happy camp

Saturday morning I was up early and after kissing the wife and wishing her a happy Christmas I was on the float tube and ready to catch me some bass.I managed a few small ones before the devil of all winds came up and blew down some branches of the trees. It was no fun in the float tube and I headed for shore to a delicious bacon and egg breakfast. The rest of the day was spend lying on the grass drinking beers and Margaritas.

Sunday morning I was up early again and after float tubing around a bit I hitched a lift with my brother in law in the row boat down to some rapids. I got another couple of small fish and landed some more on the slow paddle back up to camp again.

I didn't fish to much the weekend and also did not catch any monsters but there are definitely some big fish around. A few of them cruised around under my float tube, but ignored my flies completely.

We are back at home now a little bit sun burned and tired, but it was a fun weekend away, and I will definitely return to get some of those big ones.