Strange Occurrence Today

[WestCentralFisher]

Not much of a story here, just something I've never had happen before. I was trout fishing on a stretch of river that I know to periodically have good smallmouth bass fishing. But it's usually not consistent enough to target them. Anyway, I was fishing with an egg pattern and caught a pretty, fat smallmouth somewhere in the 12-14 inch range. At first, I was concerned it might be a foul hook situation, because what smallmouth bass would take an egg pattern? But no, it was an honest take.

Knowing that when you find one this time of year there are usually more, and figuring that had to be a coincidence, I switched to a woolly bugger, then a crayfish pattern. Outside of a couple half-hearted takes, nothing. Figuring that it maybe had just been the one smallie, I switched back to an egg pattern to target trout...and caught several more bass, mostly smallmouth but one little largemouth as well. 

Barely a story worth telling, I know. But I literally have never caught a bass on an egg pattern in my entire life, so catching multiple in less than an hour was notably strange. 

[FishnDave]

Crazy!  At this point, might as well see what the weirdest fly you can catch a bass on.  #22 Midge?

 

[tjm]

Egg has the same general shape as beetles and grubs, bass don't know that you think it's an egg. Honestly I've never thought that egg patterns looked like fish eggs  either. they say bass don't see color the way we do, mistaking chartreuse for white or vise versa etc. That egg may have looked black or yellow to the fish. I have caught smallmouth on almost all my trout flies from #16 up. Never caught a large bass on the small flies, but, I wouldn't rule it out.

[Al Agnew]

36 minutes ago, tjm said:

Egg has the same general shape as beetles and grubs, bass don't know that you think it's an egg. Honestly I've never thought that egg patterns looked like fish eggs  either. they say bass don't see color the way we do, mistaking chartreuse for white or vise versa etc. That egg may have looked black or yellow to the fish. I have caught smallmouth on almost all my trout flies from #16 up. Never caught a large bass on the small flies, but, I wouldn't rule it out.

Good point. Get yourself an app for your phone called Sim Daltonism.  It's free, and supposedly will show you what things look like with various forms of color blindness.  Bass supposedly see in dichromatic vision; they have well developed cones in their eyes for seeing red and green, but not blue.  (We humans have trichromatic vision; we have cones for red, green, and blue.  Some species have a greater range of vision than we do; they can see into the ultraviolet.)  The app will show you what various colors look like to a bass, but only an approximation that should hold true in clear, shallow water.  Light works very differently underwater than it does in the air, with various colors "disappearing" (actually turning greenish gray) at various depths as their wavelengths are absorbed by the water.  A lot of what we THINK bass see in colors is totally untrue, and makes little sense in reality.

However, because bass DO have red cones, they do see red, pink, and orange in something close to the same way we see them...as long as the water is clear and not too deep. But in the typically clear water of Ozark streams, those colors rather quickly turn to grayish green as you go deeper as the red and orange wavelengths are absorbed by the water.  But they should still look pretty close to how we see them at the typical depths that you might drift an egg pattern. 

[WestCentralFisher]

1 hour ago, tjm said:

Egg has the same general shape as beetles and grubs, bass don't know that you think it's an egg. Honestly I've never thought that egg patterns looked like fish eggs  either. they say bass don't see color the way we do, mistaking chartreuse for white or vise versa etc. That egg may have looked black or yellow to the fish. I have caught smallmouth on almost all my trout flies from #16 up. Never caught a large bass on the small flies, but, I wouldn't rule it out.

I've caught smallmouth semi-regularly while nymphing for trout, especially with larger patterns, but occasionally even something like a #16 Hare's Ear. Smaller bass definitely seem to eat aquatic insects often enough that it's a pretty reasonable way to target them. 

Egg patterns, never before until today. I've also had very little (though not zero) success with them for brown trout or anything other than stocked rainbows (I know they get used in more natural contexts in places with anadromous fish or lots of actively spawning trout). For the most part they've always been the definition of a one trick pony, though a very effective one for their specific use. Even chubs usually seem more hesitant to take them than most other things. So that's why I found it strange.