Goodbye Summertime

Sigh... the end of August. Neverending summer no longer. Instead each summer's evening now is one day closer to it's end. Yes, I know fall is the best of our year here in Ohio. It's usually dry, comfortable, fish are biting, deer hunting is starting. Yeah, yeah, it's not summer. It's not wading wet on a hot day. It's not lying beside a campfire on a rock bar watching fireflies blink on and off on the other side of the river. In summer I've been known to find some shade on the riverbank and take a midday nap. Try doing that on a January fishing trip. Don't get me wrong I fish hard all year round. But the rest of the year it's a sport, something I do. In summer it's something I live. So here we are one day left in August. One day left of glorious summer. And it's the perfect summer day, not too hot, but still hot enough that the most dependable pattern of the year still holds. Summertime is the easiest time of the year to find smallmouth. I know if the weather has been steady and the river steady I can catch a nice smallmouth in summer. Like today. The river rushes and then a small piece of it turns in on itself. You have a small kitchen table sized bowl of waist deep water with fast shallow water pouring into it from upstream and from the side in a foot tall waterfall. Find that in any quality smallmouth stream in Ohio in a spot that isn't beat to death and in summertime there is going to be a Fish Ohio smallmouth lying in there. Or like today maybe a fish almost two inches past Fish Ohio standards. I'm going to miss you summer. I miss you already and you are not even gone....

bridge fishing

Thought I'd hit a little creek a bit after work. Not far from the house but you cant really see the creek till you walk right down to it. So I walk down there and Oh No its up and very brown. Pretty ugly compared to the river. Well I'm here and there is this little railroad bridge. I love bridges, I never ever pass one by when out fishing. So I thought I'd throw at the bridge a couple minutes then head to the river. First cast nothing and the grub is just ripped along by the current. I walk down to the end of the wall leading out from the bridge, Stick the rod over and flip the bail. The grub sinks and I close the bail as it is swept by the fast current around the downstream end of the wall. Thump! And it's a nice smallie cartwheeling on the end of about seven feet of line. Love me some bridges...

Philosofishing....

The thought crossed my mind last night while knee deep in a river somewhere that river fishing for striped fish is a lot like the quote used to describe World War I, "boredom punctuated by moments of terror".
One minute you are watching a kingfisher dive bomb minnows across the pool and idly listening to birdsong and the next you are stumbling half drowned trying to keep up as a fish tries it's best to empty your reel. It's the nature of the game really. In a small river you are denied the 3000 horsepower metalflake beast bristling with sonar, graphs, hydrowave, photon torpedoes and lord knows what else. Instead you chase a highly migratory fish in a watershed a hundred miles long armed only with the hope that this is a good spot, a fish will feed here, if not now later, if not today, tomorrow.
Which in many ways makes it even more magical when it works.

adventure fishing...

Maybe a bit too much adventure tonight. I'm fishing along and it's hot and real steamy. It's supposed to rain and the thought crosses my mind I wish it would hurry up and get here. A half hour later I hear a rumble and look behind me. OMG, you are about to get punished and punished bad Steven. I'm nowhere near the truck and have no rain gear and it's obvious I'm about to pay and pay dearly for both mistakes. Well I'm not making the truck before it hits hopefully it will just blow over fast and be done with. I'll just fish thru it and hope the front gets the fish biting. Mistake number three. Soon I'm as wet as I've ever been. I'm pretty sure the part of me underwater in the river was dryer than the part above water. At least it was warmer underwater. It rains hard, then harder, then really really hard. I'm fishing this riffle that has a cliffy bank on the far side and parts of the cliff start coming off and plopping in the water. The river turns from kinda stained to chocolate milk in a matter of minutes. Okay time to give up. I'm walking back to the truck and in the distance I can see water gushing into the river next to the bridge I'm parked at. Okay we gotta check that out, it's not like I can get any wetter. It's a drain pipe for the road above. No water coming out a couple hours ago and now a stream ten inches around cascading into the river. I've got a curly shad dropped off the back of a mini Alabama rig. I cast about ten feet past the pipe and bring it up to where the water is gushing into the river. There a foot off the bank and me with eight or ten feet of line out a big hybrid just murders the lure and screams out into the current. It's not a great photo but I love it, look at the water streaming off the fishes fins and off my elbow. A half hour later I took the third photo after the rain had stopped of a blown out river with huge rafts of debris floating by. If I ever earned a nice fish I earned this one tonight..

storm clouds on the horizon...

Thunder rumbling in the background, the river still fishable tho. Wind in the treetops. Fishing with my favorite fishing buddy Dave. Just one fish but I'll take it every time if it's a dandy hybrid. On a big curly shad dropped off the back of a mini Alabama rig in a shallow fast riffle.

What a difference a day makes....

The story actually starts yesterday. Starting to feel a little stale from non stop smallmouth fishing this summer I'd decided to take a couple weeks and chase stripey fish. Or maybe I just hadn't gotten them completely out of my system from a couple recent trips to Tennessee. But anyhow here I was thirty miles south of my normal smallie waters chasing stripes. I caught a smallish one maybe three pounds and it was getting late around thirty minutes to dark I'd guess. I tied on a zara spook and made a few cast with it. I was standing just above a short but fast riffle and firing casts downstream. Against the current like this you could walk the spook almost in place retrieving it slowly but with lots of action. Blam, a fish knocks the spook a foot in the air end over end and then clobbers it right when it hits the water. Zing the drag just pours out line. Okay plenty of room to play it, no use to pull the hook so I let it run knowing it's a big fish. It runs then takes a sharp right turn and begins running back towards me. Right past the only rock in a hundred yards of wide open river it could get hung up on. I've got the rod held high overhead trying to clear the rock. No go. I wade right in, blowing out the spot but this is a fish big enough you would do that for. Ping! brand new 20 lb braid popped. strong language was used....
Today. Okay you really don't have time to fish, you would only have an hour at most. And not at dark which is primo stripey time. Yeah but rain rain rain, what if it blows out??? So there I was. It was early, too early for the spook I thought so I put on something new I've been playing with. Back in the winter at one of the fishing shows I bought a couple Evilution spinnerbaits. These guys have like a mini alabama rig sprouting out of the spinnerbait wire with four willowleaf blades. I know down in Tennessee Alabama rigs are all the rage for purebred stripers, I didn't see why a little castable version wouldn't work on our hybrids. I took the skirt off and replaced it with a paddletail swimbait Vic had given me for even more of an Alabama rig look. It actually worked in current really well. Willowleaf spinnerbaits usually do but it turns out so do four willowleafs. Same riffle as last night. Blam, and what rockets skyward but a big smallmouth!! Lovely fish it jumped three times, one a cartwheel end over end. Not a fat fish but really really long. Then ten minutes later not really a strike, one second I'm reeling it in and the next line is screaming out, a dandy hybrid this time. What a fantastic little short trip! I feel pretty lucky tonight.

fish portraits

summerbass...

This fish made me happy. I've had a bit of a slow week at least for smallmouth and then this fish just put on a heck of a show. Tailwalking one second then digging under a rock the next then seemingly three feet straight up, it was the kind of fish we hope for every time we go out. So strong and just right there on the edge every second till it was landed. Thank you fish.

Dam hand line fishin...

So today I headed out on a different kind of fishing adventure. I brought the trusty spinning rod as a crutch in case I needed it but I was hoping to catch some fish on a handline. Turns out I could have left the rod at home. Everyone I know has been catching a bunch of channels lately so it seemed like the time was right to try it so I headed out to a local lowhead dam. My rig was simple, maybe a bit too simple. Some 50lb test mono wrapped around a plastic bottle with an egg sinker, swivel, and hook. I also brought a minnow bucket and a cast net. I'm no great shakes with a cast net but I am getting better and it makes getting bait as fun as the fishing sometimes. What I ended up with were mostly shiners. You hook the bait and twirl it in a circle overhead letting go at the right moment to send it out where you want. It takes a bit of practice but it's not really that hard. There is a million videos on you tube if you haven't seen someone cast. You can actually cast a pretty good ways without slinging off your bait and next time I'll have more line. There were a couple times I actually cast all of what I had. Then you just hold the line and feel for a bite. Which to me was the funnest part of the whole thing, the direct feeling you get of the fish hitting your bait then feeding it a bit of line as it took it. The hardest thing I found was setting the hook without the long lever of the rod. I missed several and had a few come off after just a few seconds. Fighting the fish is actually pretty straightforward and with the heavy line pretty easy. I guess if I had hooked a 50 lb shovel it might not have been so simple. All in all it's actually a pretty effective way to fish bait and I might have to come up with a rig I can keep in the pack.

Checking on the kids...

Since I've spent most of the last couple weeks in Tennessee I figured I'd better check on my smallies now that I'm home. No big numbers but I caught a couple good ones on a clear with black flake grub in shallow fast water. What I found numbers of was channels. I caught seven on the grub. Yep seven on a lure, no idea what was going on there. I bet the channel fishing would have been epic if I had some bait with me. This was right as the wind came up and it began to darken before the storm so I guess they went into a bit of a feeding frenzy. The channels, like the smallmouth were up in about a foot of very fast water right where the riffle ends and the pool begins to start.

Tennessee...