Four Trips... None Easy

Since my last entry, I've had some pretty lackluster fishing. Typically, September is a pretty good month for big fish around here, but since my last entry things have been a bit strange. I did two trips using conventional gear with Josh...both were brutal. I'll give you a brief summary:

Trip one: All day trip to the Tippecanoe. The only picture taken was of the Drift Boat. We landed 18 Smallies all day and not one of them was bigger than 15 inches. I honestly will never fish this stretch again.

You know it was brutal when the trip's only picture is of your boat.

Trip two: We did an afternoon wade when, according to Meteorologist Josh Chrenko, there was only a 7% chance of rain. I looked at the weather on three websites, every one of them said 60% chance of thunderstorms. For some reason, I went with my fishing buddy's prognostication over those fancy weathermen. How do you think the trip ended up? We caught probably 25 fish in three hours, but Hurricane Hoosier put a quick end to our trip. About 3 hours in, Josh looks out to the west and we see black clouds. We decided to have him float back down to the car and I would wade upstream to the next bridge. The storm moved in pretty freaking quick after we split up. I've been in some less than favorable weather situations while hunting or fishing (blizzard in the Rocky Mountains while Elk hunting, ice storms while deer hunting, -10 degrees while rabbit hunting, etc.) and this was a pretty nasty storm that I'll remember for a long time. I waded the last mile in 40mph wind, lightning, and sheets of rain. I did catch a few in the peak of the storm on topwater, which was pretty awesome.

About 2 hours after the storm started, I drug my soggy ass into Josh's car and we headed home. We had a couple of bad trips in a row, but I do love getting out with Josh. He's one of those guys that can teach you something every time you go out if you're paying attention. These particular lessons: (1) don't trust him over a meteorologist and (2) go bottom-up when nose-hooking a fluke.

Trip Three: I also did a couple of trips with my brother since my last entry. We used fly rods for both trips and had a little better luck. On the chilly morning of October 1st, we went to a stretch that normally is dominated by a canoe livery. We thought there was absolutely no way they would be running canoes that day, or for the past month, since the water was so low. I was chucking a streamer and Jeremiah was casting topwater to start out. About 20 minutes in, he had four fish and I had one. We both switched to topwater and started landing fish. We probably had 6-8 each within the first hour. This stretch is a gorgeous hole, riffle, hole, riffle kind of area. We approached a hole with a flat rock bottom that had a line of boulders on the left side. Jeremiah put a cast right on a 16" fish's nose and he ate big. As he fought the fish, the fish dove and he broke my 5wt (due to a series of incidents we're down to two decent fly rods between us). Jeremiah hiked back to the truck to grab our back-up fly rod (a crappy $30 rig) and I remained in that spot. I spent the next 45 minutes brining in 8 fish out of this area no bigger than 20' x 30' and less than 3' deep. Around 11:30 a.m. we heard the familiar sound of polyethylene dragging across rock. The canoe livery was running trips for some reason and the canoes were dragging almost the whole way. It's completely crazy they were still running canoes. We caught a few more, but there was a near constant stream of agitated canoers coming our way. We ended up with around 25 total fish (3x16, 1x17).

Opening morning of deer season and we're hunting brown

Trip Four: My last trip was a fly rod trip with Jeremiah on October 14th. We elected to wade about 3 miles upstream near Shades State Park on this particular morning. I picked up a new fly rod from Temple Fork Outfitters, TFO Mangrove 7wt, and was eager to get a fish on the new stick. I knew it would be a streamer morning and tied on a Feathered Game Changer, Jeremiah started off with topwater again. About 5 minutes in, I put a cast right behind a boulder. A fish swelled and rolled his tail out of the water just to let me know he was huge, then missed my fly. He wouldn't come back for it either.

I picked up a couple fish within the first 30 minutes, but Jeremiah couldn't get anything going. I noticed a fish eat big on top near middle of the river. I put a cast on his nose and he ate my streamer. When I brought him in, I noticed a small Bullfrog in his mouth. He must have just eaten him because he spit the frog out and the frog swam away unharmed. Think about how weird of a morning that Bullfrog had. He's swimming along and gets eaten by a fish, then the fish gets hooked by a giant, then he gets spit out and swims away freely... Nobody is going to believe his stories.

A few minutes later, I was working my streamer around some broken up rock and got another big swell. This fish crushed my streamer and I brought a nice 18" smallie to hand. He gave me a really nice fight and after such a long drought, I was pretty stoked to bring a good fish to hand. Unfortunately, I only got a couple of pictures before I dropped him back in the water by accident. Either way, great scenery and a beautiful native 18" Smallmouth made the trip a complete success.

The wade on October 14th was a brutal 3 mile wade, which left both of us pretty exhausted. I think I ended up with 17 fish and Jeremiah caught maybe 9. Surprisingly, we were still finding fish near current and in micro-habitats. They definitely aren't "wintered up" yet, but we did notice most, if not all, of the carp were in slow current. All in all, we were pretty happy with the results. I definitely loved the new rod as well. It's looking like 23" is going to have to wait until next year, but we do have all winter...