Just A Little Creek

[ozark trout fisher]

Just a short story about an outing on a little smallmouth stream today...

It may not be spring yet, but it sure seems like it. It's warm, about 55 degrees, and the soft breeze reminds me of an April day. This time of year, it seems as if the whole world is waking up, and a couple of warm days had me wondering if it was finally time to try catch some fish. So here I am on a little creek five miles out of town, fly rod in hand. I see that the stream-flow has finally started to drop significantly after snow-melt and rain made it a muddy mess, and the water is now tannish green, the visibility up to about a foot and a half. The conditions aren't ideal, but there just might be a chance.

Of course, there's never much more than that on this creek. This is anything but a but a blue ribbon smallmouth stream. The headwaters are right in the middle of a good sized town, and most people look at this stream as nothing more than a polluted ditch. Things have gotten so bad that one of its little tributary streams has taken to turning a sickly neon green color from some sort of a chemical leak, an issue that I've been devoting a lot of time trying to figure out lately. Man has not dealt this stream a fair hand at all, and it's one of the saddest things I've ever seen. But down here, well outside of town, the conditions are just good enough to support a very limited smallmouth population. I've been fishing this stretch of creek since I discovered it this past August. The mixture of its beautiful native smallmouth bass and the complete lack of any protection has been a source of consternation for me ever since that is almost as prevailing as the sense of peace I always get from fishing it. But I'm not thinking about any of that now. My mind is squarely in the moment, and my only thoughts are about how I can fool a couple sluggish late winter smallmouth.

I start in a deep bluff-hole, my favorite pool on the whole stream. The fly choice is the easiest part. I tie on a #8 Black Woolly Bugger, heavily weighted to get down quickly in the heavy flow. The technique couldn't be more simple. Let the fly sink down to the bottom, and retrieve as slowly as humanly possible, all the while waiting for a strike that probably won't come. It isn't the most exciting sort of fly fishing, but it's the only way to catch fish when water temperatures are like this.

But it just isn't working. At first I have trouble getting myself to retrieve slow enough, the same problem that is familiar to anyone who ever fishes soft plastics on a spinning rod. But even after I get past this, the fish just won't cooperate. After about an hour of this, I resign myself to the fact that this is just going to be one of those late winter/early spring days where the fishing isn't going to come together. It doesn't take me long to accept that, and I'm back to just enjoying the beautiful day. While I'm still fishing, it's bit of an afterthought.

I'm finally shaken out of my daydreaming by a sluggish pull on my line. At first I think I'm just on the bottom, but I set the hook anyway, just in case. Sure enough it's a fish, but at first the fight is lethargic. Finally he realizes that he's hooked, and makes a good run. It's not big, but the hard pull tells me that this is no bluegill or green sunfish. It doesn't take long to bring him to bay, a 10 inch jewel with the almost washed-out coloration of smallmouth that reside in murky water. I take a moment to admire this unlikely little treasure, a fish that is remarkably resilient to be able to survive in such a beautiful, but desperately impaired stream. Then I release him, and he makes his way back to his hold, to help sustain a smallmouth population that will hopefully be allowed to thrive in the future.

[lunkertrout]

Nice read...can't beat a nice smallie on a Friday in February. Unfortunately there's more than a handful of streams in similar duress as the one you describe.

[ozark trout fisher]

  On 2/18/2012 at 3:28 AM, lunkertrout said:

Nice read...can't beat a nice smallie on a Friday in February. Unfortunately there's more than a handful of streams in similar duress as the one you describe.

Thanks!

There sure are too many streams that are having to deal with this. It's hard to watch such an otherwise beautiful stream get treated like most think it isn't worth anything.

[Midwest troutbum]

A bright green may unfortunately be antifreeze or sewer district tracing dye or mosquito poison. Either way i wouldnt want to be wade fishing or touching the water directly.

[E Green]

i enjoyed that...thanks