This time of year I spend a lot of time daydreaming about next year. Either while I'm twenty feet up a tree bowhunting deer or at the vise creating something. Lately I've been working on filling a little fly box for fishing a couple tiny creeks near my home. There's nothing special about them. Warm fertile and full of tiny bass and sunfish they run behind old factories, thru the back of farms, behind the ball field. Pretty much your average creek anywhere in the Midwest. And they have the most beautiful fish in the world in them, the longear sunfish. Honestly if this beauty was half a world away up the Congo they would be all the rage of the aquarium world. Find me a prettier fish anywhere, I dare you.

Instead it's forgotton, ignored, overlooked. But slip down to the creek, find a rock to sit on a while.  After a bit, after things settle down, if your lucky you can see them down there in the clear water. and that's what makes fishing for them so interesting to me. Silly little sunfish, in a tiny creek never fished for, a piece of cake right? Wrong! When you are that far down on the food chain, when the catfish, the raccoons, the herons, the smallmouth, the snakes and on and on all look at you as a possible meal, well you get a little skittish. It's master level presentation training. Oh the fly selection is pretty easy, anything small enough presented lightly enough is probably going to be eaten. But it's glass clear water with brush and tree limb everywhere throwing tiny flies on the tiniest gear you have. If that doesn't make you a better stream smallmouth fisherman, a better trout dry fly man, a better, stealthier wader, well, maybe it's time to take up gardening. But present a fly lightly enough, delicately enough around and brush or vegetation, in any small eddy or backwater and you'll probably be rewarded. Unlike some types of fishing where you can do everything right and still not catch a fish, this fishing lets you know. Yep, got that right, nope flubbed that spot. But thirty foot upstream is another tiny pool, another spot to get it right or fail all over again. It's easy to get lost in this type of fishing and suddenly look up and realize the clear morning light has changed into the dark shadows of evening without you even noticing. It's something I've missed and as part of my vow to get back to basic stream fishing next year, something I'm going to be doing more of. I like small bright flies that both the fish and I can see. Parachutes, Wulfs, elk hair caddis on top and brightly colored beadheads, flies that serve double duty as brook trout flies. Another beautiful little fish where presentation means more than imitation.  Both longears and brookies are like tiny little jewels once brought to hand. It doesn't matter how many I've seen I still stop and stare with wonder at each new one. Maybe it's character defect that limits my growth this ability to be entertained by the same thing over and over. I like to think its an appreciation of beauty. When you look up longear sunfish online it's hard to find more than a paragraph. Most a few words tossed their way with a passing reference to how pretty they are. Pretty? Calling lomgear sunfish pretty is like calling Salma Hayek pretty, like calling a redwood just a tree, like calling a wolverine wild. The word hardly has enough meaning to do them justice. Exquisite, jewellike, breathtaking....Yeah I know its just a tiny little fish. Well wade a creek in summertime and bring one to hand and hold it in the sunlight streaming thru the trees and see if you don't fall in love too...