Big trip, little trip

With just a few hours till time to leave for work and the Little Miami still muddy I headed for Turtle Creek. A beautiful little creek too small to even remotely take serious as a fishing destination the creek has tiny smallmouth bass, the occasional carp, and those living jewels, the longeared sunfish. No matter how small, each one is a perfect work of art. Mostly various shades of blue ranging from metallic blue to the blue of the night sky just before dawn. Mix in the orange of pumpkins in fall and buttery yellows and somehow this riotous mix blends togethor perfectly. In hand, I'm always amazed at how much more lovely they are than they ever would need to be.



Strangely the one thing Ill remember most about this tiny trip was a bug the fish don't eat, the water strider. On the water was literaly thousands of what looked to be water striders. I say looked to be because thay were less than half the size of any I'd ever seen before but up close looked just like the Jesus Bugs I'd always known. Called Jesus bugs by country people because they walk on water, Ive never seen or heard of one ever being eaten by fish even though they would seem to be an easy mark. Indeed my dry fly was repeatedly attacked and these bugs ignored by the fish.





I have a short slow action cane fly rod I made out of an old longer broken one that loads well at the short ranges required in the creek. Its a rod that has been admired just on its looks and I like to think of it as being just like the sunfish, Light, scrappy and much prettier than it needs to be...





Lunch was a hatfull of streamside berries...



A few days later I ended up at the opposite end of the scale, below mighty Greenup Dam on the Ohio River.



Greenup is special in that there are points and swirls and eddies, nooks and crannies everywhere that you can reach from bank. Lazy after working on the roof of my cabin I fished chicken liver, half dozing in the shade. I was hoping for a hybrid striper or at least a nice catfish but instead a caught a gar. Gar do have the appealing quality of being just a bit scary and a fish I love to catch though no one else seems to like them one bit.



Waking up a bit I fished a grub in a big eddy below a small rocky point and caught several sauger.





Fishing shallower around the big rocks covering the point I caught four largemouths on spinners trying to catch a white bass. It seems it was a day to catch fish other than the ones I was trying to catch but that was okay, after all I was catching fish, which makes everything okay. Still trying to find the whites I fished a rattletrap in the current. Again I caught something else. Or rather alot of something elses. Fiesty skipjacks about a foot long slammed the silver crankbait then launched themselves skyward, looking like minature tarpon. Although I caught alot of fish a man and his young son literaly caught skipjacks every cast by catching bait in a cast net and fishing it under a floater in the eddies just out of the main current. Bird highlights were an immature bald eagle circling the dam repeatedly and an osprey catching a fish almost too heavy for it to carry. Downstream, below the first point, a kingfisher fished the same eddy as me catching minnow after minnow while I was there. All in all a very cool fishing trip...