Lately....

Finally getting a bit of time to fish. Nothing special, a few small hybrids and smallmouth bass. Nothing really picture worthy.  The most enjoyable trip of the new year was catching some channels with a green springy limb bent over and held in place with a stick trigger that is placed in a notch in a stake driven in the ground. The pressure of the bent limb holds the trigger in place till a fish tugs on the line pulling the trigger out of the notch. The limb then springs up setting the hook. I placed the setup where a pipe from a nearby factory dumps some hot water into the river. Out in front of the pipe a number of carp and catfish could be seen soaking up the warmth. Fishing with worms I caught three channels and a carp in about an hour. The fish were actually really warm to the touch. More of a stunt than anything I guess but a fun way to ill some time on a old winter day. Another highlight was seeing an eagle perched on thin ice out on Cowan lake. It was an eagle kind of week, I saw three or four this week as well as dozens of hawks perched on roadside wires pushed down here to southern Ohio by winter. The gar were byproducts of chasing hybrids in Ohio river tribs. Kind of a strange but interesting week.

The granny witch....

       I have found there are actually hundreds if not thousands of native American sites that are not well-known. That aren't on some trail map or marked  by signage in a park. When researching my book on the little Miami, I discovered that many are listed and described in old records in places like county historical societies. They're just not mentioned today.  If it is not a county or state park there isn't much currently available on the internet. This is one of those places mentioned and described in a few books at the turn of the last century than largely forgotten. I often get sidetracked while fishing the river and wander up side creeks looking for fossils, arrowheads, and generally just poking around. It's one of the main reasons I know I'd make a lousy competitive fisherman. Well I wondered up this creek finding the occasional fossil and what I thought might be a nutting stone. A nutting stone is a stone that has shallow depressions worked into the face of it that are perfect for an Indian to place a walnut into and bust open with another rock. I'm sure busting walnuts open was a big deal, after all nuts are full of calories and fats, precious things to a hunter gatherer society. I wondered up a tiny draw off of the creek and emerged onto the flat overlooking the river. There was the earthworks, a small circle maybe 30 feet in diameter surrounded by another circle maybe 60 or 70 feet across. Both were only a couple feet tall and both have mature trees growing on them and I mean mature trees. One big white oak was dying of old age so what's that, four or five hundred years at least. I visited the earthworks a couple more times that year and told my friend Banty about it. Banty gets her nickname from her resemblance to a bantam chicken, tiny and round. Banty is pure Appalachian hillbilly, born and raised in Eastern Kentucky on the Tennessee border, my kind of people. I don't get a lot of people in this world, the vast majority actually, but hillbilly I understand. After all both of my parents family trees are rooted deeply in Appalachia. Well a month or so passed and Banty messaged me. She had told Granny about my find and Granny wanted me to take her to the mounds.  Granny, I ask?  What Granny is, it seems is what I've heard referred to as a granny witch, a hill woman versed in healing, natural cures, and a few unnatural ones. Granny would give me $100 to take her. Okay I'm in, more out of curiosity than for the money though. So we make plans for me to greet meet Granny at a carryout close to the river the following weekend. The morning of I'm sitting in the parking lot of the carryout and an F-150 with Tennessee plates pulls up next to me. Okay that's not a granny, it's a pretty lady about 30-ish in a Allman Brothers t-shirt and jeans and a ponytail. She walks over to the truck and introduces herself. I grab my daypack and hop in her truck. The bed of the truck is covered in cut walking sticks. You know the kind where a vine is growing up a small sapling and the young tree ends up growing around the vine creating a spiral pattern up the trunk. I get in the passenger side and there's a box turtle shell in the footwell and a couple wild turkey feathers are stuffed under the sun visor, bluegrass plays.  Grand smiles and laughs easily, has freckles and has eyes as dark as Kentucky coal. I'm pretty glad I agreed to come. I do the turn here, go left, park here, till we arrive at a pull off where a creek dumps into the river. Granny pulls a pair of rubber boots and a canvas sack out from behind the seat. We set off up the creek. Granny seems in no hurry, like me or any other big kid, Granny pokes along up the creek looking at rocks. We talked easily about natural history and the land. She found several more fossils than I did, three or four staghorn corals, some busted flint and a skull of a small animal. We start up the small draw climbing towards the top. Looking at wild ginger and admiring a jack-in-the-pulpit. I point out a small ginseng plant. Finally we top out and arrive at the earthworks. Granny stops short and looks a while. Then she points at a fallen log and says softly you wait here and I'll get you when I'm done. I sat listening to the birds in the trees and the sound of the wind. I don't normally like to sit and do nothing, except in the woods, I can do that for hours and I soon lost track of time. After a while I glanced over my shoulder and Granny had started a small fire in the center of the innermost ring. She was on her knees doing something with small objects spread out on a cloth. From where I sat I couldn't tell what they were. I turned back around listen to a crow calling on the other side of the river. I felt a touch on my shoulder and there was Granny. She smiled softly, "I'm ready to go".  Granny was quiet on the walk out though she didn't seem upset, just calm. I didn't ask any questions on the drive back to my car and when we pulled up Granny smiled and asked if I would occasionally take her back. I nodded yes as Granny pressed a folded up hundred dollar bill and a small quartz rock into my hand. For some reason I remember the song Stone Walls by Three Tall Pines was playing in her truck, the first time I'd ever heard it. And then she left. And that is my story of my first meeting with the granny witch.

a little bit more 2019...

Lots of rain. The creeks coming up and with warmer water than the Ohio because of the rain. I could just picture this pulling the fish a bit tighter into the mouths of the streams dumping into the big river.  Sometimes it's just grinding it out in winter but sometimes it's timing. Today was timing. I started close to Cincy and drove out 52, heading east and targeting the mouths of five or six streams. At three I found fish. Nothing spectacular but at a rate you would call a fish every now and then, which is all you can really ask for in winter.  Water resistant hunting jacket over the waterproof hodgeman wading jacket, knee high rubber boots and still ending up covered in mud and soaking wet and smelling like a wet dog. All the fish came on a 3/8 ounce jighead and either a paddletail grub or a curly shad.

sneaking in a few last trips for the year

Well we got one day off from the hospital. She just wanted to nap so it was off to the river and out of her hair with me for the first time in weeks. I fished Vic's new lipless crankbait in a deep slow hole. Lifting it up off the bottom then letting it settle again on a tight line, repeatedly. On another rod I hair rigged two kernals of corn just trying to avoid a skunk since it's been so daggone cold and I've been out of touch with my smallies for so long. I ended up fishing 3 hours and caught a few fish on each method. One very small smb and one dandy on the crankbait, and two big common carp and one small but very beautiful mirror carp on the hair rig. Plus a small channel foul hooked. Saw an eagle perched in a riverside sycamore. Heard Sandhills calling somewhere downstream. A much needed break and a wonderful winter trip.

polar plunge

I headed back to the same spot as the day before hoping to recreate some of the same magic. Same lure, Vic's new lipless crankbait. At most five minutes in I let the lure fall on a tight line then lifted into a heavy weight. The rod just surged as the fish took line. At this point I'm sure I've snared a big carp or something. But there is none of the feeling of tail hitting line or panic you get from a snared carp, just weight, lots of weight. Strong runs with the rod bent into the cork. Then finally some minutes later a big black tail and mottled body roll on the surface. It's a shovel. And a really big one. More dogged runs and finally the fish is seemingly spent.
The hole actually has a very gradual slope on the bank I'm on and just inches deep way out. I've got rubber boots on so I wade out to grab the big cat rather than try to drag it over the shallows and have it bust off. I wade out and grab the big lower lip without too much trouble. D#@N it's big. Thirty five pounds? Forty? Easily the third or fourth biggest fish of the year behind some giant spoonbills snared saugeye fishing below dams on the Ohio. And definitely the biggest fish out of a smaller river. I raise the big cat and walk back towards the bank. A feet from the bank the fish thrashes and wrenches free. The lipless crank comes flying back and smacks me in the forehead sticking there. I'm unhooking the lure and cussing when I look down and the big fish is lying at my feet in seven inches of water exhausted. I dive on top of it. I'm literally sitting on top of the fish a leg on each side, my hands pinning it against the bottom. Well, $#%^ now what? I slide my hand forward trying to grab the fish again in the mouth. What I end up with a grip on it's upper jaw, not the lower one. I'm trying to get a grip on it's lower  jaw as the fish slowly comes to life. Squirming and trying to swim into deeper water. The fish is slowly making headway as I'm frantically trying to keep it pinned but it slowly comes loose. In slow motion like in a movie the fish just slides thru my hands till I'm trying to hold it just in front of the tail with both hands. Sigh, I'm on hands and knees in a foot of forty degree water soaked to skin with a forty three degree air temperature. And yes I'd had it in hand but as the old saying goes... Pics or it didn't happen. That's twice this year I've been bit with the dropsies, I dropped the best striper of the year a few months earlier in Tennessee while trying to set up the camera for a photo and watched it slide ten feet back down the bank into the river.
Back at the car sitting on the trunk pouring water out of my boots I remember thinking is it spring yet????

winter crankbaits

I haven't been able to fish much lately but having the long holiday weekend let me sneak out for a bit. I found a few fish in about waist deep water on a gravel hump that separates a slow hole from the main flow. No go on the soft plastics and suspending minnow plugs but I did catch some fish on a new lipless crankbait that Vic is bringing to market. A lipless crank is actually a top notch winter lure. You just fish it differently than you do in the summer. Every one that knows me knows I'm a big fan of fishing a lipless crankbait at night for saugeye and summertime shovelheads but I'm fishing it completely differently for wintertime smallmouth.  I'd cast it out and let it fall to the bottom on a tight line. Then let it set for a few seconds then lift it off the bottom then let it fall to the bottom again on a tight line almost like fishing a worm. Lift fall lift fall. Every fish hit as the lure settled back after being lifted. Some days the fish like you popping it sharply off the bottom while some days an easy lift does the trick. I've even had days where you reel down to the lure and kind of shake it in place like you would a shaky head and barely move it and this does the trick. Today the fish actually hit the bait pretty well but some days in winter you just feel the weight of the fish on the line as you start the next lift. I'm not normally a big fan of fluorocarbon for smallmouth but I do like it for wintertime lipless cranks. It gives you sensitivity but with a larger diameter than braid which makes the bait fall back to the bottom slower.
Nothing of course beats wading a summertime stream for smalljaws but I do enjoy the stark beauty and silence of the river in winter. A silence that actually seems to magnify the calls of ducks winging up the river or the faraway music of a flock of sandhills high overhead. The winter river is a noisy quiet place. It seems dead and lifeless at first but by the time you are done it seems I have more wildlife encounters per hour spent on the river than any other time of year. Today was no different, in the distance I saw a huge flock of sandhills and watched a couple deer feed quietly on the opposite riverbank.

A bit of catch up.

I've been working a lot, that combined with the short days has really put a damper on my smallmouth fishing. I've caught a few this past week or so, just nobody really worth a photo. I've been catching several saugfish after dark on a new minnow plug Vic is coming out later this winter as well as a few stripey fish. I ended up feeling a thump one night and sinking one of the plugs trebles solidly into the paddle of a big spoonbill. Thank goodness it didn't break me off since the plug was so solidly embeded into it's bill imnot sure it would have come loose on its own. The big carp wasn't snared but actually ate a three inch grub. That seems to happen a bit more often in the cold. I guess as food gets harder to come by carp add a bit more meat to their diet. Then on my way home from tagging some more venison for the freezer I stopped at a wildlife area pond and caught some nice gills.