The Night Time is the right Time!

[Johnsfolly]

All year my daughter and I have been fighting weather, water conditions and life in general to keep putting new species, i.e., lifers, on the list. Livie is rapidly (albeit likely due to her obsessive father) getting within striking distance of achieving a milestone number of species on her life list. I often do a fair amount of research on water bodies and techniques to put us in the postion to catch some new species. I have heard about locations and decided that we needed to do a night trip up to Pennsylvania to try for the Chesapeake Logperch. The creek is a tributary of the Susquehanna river and is just across the MD/PA border (some would call that the Mason-Dixon line😉). We drove to the location that I thought gave us the best chance of finding a suitable parking spot and access to a productive stretch of the creek. I couldn't find a suitable place to park and ended up well upstream from the intended fishing location. What we didn't know as we were getting gear ready and donning our waders that this was going to turn out to be a happy accident. We ended up in a location that had a large number of the target species. We were fishing Tanago style microhooks (#26) and tiny pieces of redworm. Getting to the water at night can often be a difficult or challenging time. We eventually got to the water level. We saw a few non-interested sunfish, lots of crayfish and even a few darters. When we really got fishing we easily caught tessellated darters off the bat. This was before we could discern the tessellated darters from the target species.

Livie caught the first C logperch of the night.

Once we had that fish in the bag it was easy to id the logperch from the tessellated darters. I will say that the T darters were much more aggressive and easier to catch. The logperch would either ignore the bait, eat then spit the bait once or twice before ignoring the bait or would bite but not get hooked. After her logperch catch Livie tried for other fish as I muddled thru one logperch after another trying to finally land one. Fortunately they were very locally abundant and I did get an adult logperch in the photo bag.

We didn't notice before we started taking photos that mine has some sort of eye disease. Maybe that helped me catch it 😉.

Livie did catch her first ever white sucker as well as these lifer logperch.

After a couple of hours we made it back to the car and the long ride home, albeit a happy ride.

[Daryk Campbell Sr]

Awesome time.   I'm getting excited about making it back out to some of my spots.  Logperch and madtoms are on the top of my list.   

[Johnsfolly]

2 hours ago, Daryk Campbell Sr said:

Awesome time.   I'm getting excited about making it back out to some of my spots.  Logperch and madtoms are on the top of my list.   

Good luck buddy! Both can be fun and frustrating🤔. I hope that you catch a bunch.

[FishnDave]

Congrats on the darters and logperches!  Not easy fish to catch!

[bfishn]

6 hours ago, FishnDave said:

...Not easy fish to catch!

Not when you insist on doing it the hard way. 😁

[FishnDave]

50 minutes ago, bfishn said:

Not when you insist on doing it the hard way. 😁

ok.  yes.  very true.  I admit I AM doing it the way I want to.  Not the best nor easiest way.  😁

We all love a good challenge, do we not?

[Ham]

I had a tough day. I had a full description of it, but the website decided that it would just glitch out and wipe it out.

im too irritated to try to recreate it.

I wanted Longnose Gar today. I didn’t catch any. 
I was able to get 84) Western Blacktail Shiner though. I also caught a couple Mooneye. There will be payback for the fish that frustrated me today though. I promise. 

[Quillback]

Mooneye is a good name for them.