Spring Bass - Back to School

Wednesday was another of those variable spring days typical of early April.  Trish and I spent four hours midday enjoying the sunshine while pruning and cleaning out our raspberry and strawberry patches.  When we finished I decided to make the short jaunt to the Schaffhausen's pond to see how the bass were behaving.

By the time I climbed out of my truck and starting casting, dark clouds had rolled in, spitting little raindrops, and the temperature was in free fall.  Conventional wisdom has it that a sudden pressure drop turns off the fish, so I wasn't expecting much action.  But I started with a Texas-rigged Senko worm on a spinning rod and caught a 3 lb. largemouth on the first cast.  Within 20 minutes I caught a couple more and  decided to shake things up by using my Sage Smallmouth fly rod.  After about 20 casts with a popper I decided that it was pointless to try to entice the bass to the surface - they just weren't going for it.  So I checked my bass fly box and found a few size-4 weighted crawfish imitations that I tied last summer.  They were experiments, not quite like any other crawfish "flies" I've ever seen - I remembered tying them with materials that I had on hand, trying to be creative.  I noticed that one of them had heavy dumbbell eyes and a set of semi-realistic claws made of shaped and laquered feathers.  It looked like something that might fool a bass and that could be cast in the rising wind, so I tied it on, slung it as far out into the pond as I could, and jerked it very slowly along the bottom, trying to imagine how a real crawfish might scoot along.  Sure enough, I hooked another 3 lb. bass, and found that the fight was a bit more exciting on the fly rod.

By that time I was seriously wet and cold and my hands were getting numb.  A glance up at the sky didn't give me cause for optimism, so I decided to cash it in and drive down to Doylestown to attend the monthly Bucks County Trout Unlimited chapter meeting.  It was a great call because not only did I thaw out, but I also got to hear a fascinating presentation by Mark Sendotti, who is a reknowned fly caster and an innovative fly tier and streamer fisherman.  If you are largely unfamiliar with fly fishing, you may not know that "flies" include not only imitations of actual flies such as mayflies, caddis flies, stoneflies and midges, but also imitations of terrestial insects such as grasshoppers and crickets, and aquatic creatures such as crawfish and minnows.  The category of imitation flies commonly called "streamers" includes subsurface flies that primarily imitate minnows, and sometimes also leeches, crawfish, hellgrammites and other relatively large animals.  Streamers often attract larger-than-average predator fish.  Sendotti's presentation was about how and why these streamer flies catch large trout when they are properly presented.  To make a long story short, streamers attract a target fish based on the target fish's hunger, its territoriality, and/or its predatory attack instincts, which can be triggered by the type of movement the streamer makes.  That movement is controlled by the fisherman.  It made me think about my experience on the bass pond that afternoon, and the way I had slowly jigged my crawfish "fly" along the bottom to imitate the natural movement of such an animal.  Sendotti taught us a lot about how to vary such movements to fit different circumstances and targets.  It reminded me that fisherman, like everyone else, can always keep learning, and should.

As I progress through my third stage of life, I'll keep going to school, figuratively if not literally, as often as possible.  I remember reading Erica Jong's novel "Fear of Flying" when I was in my early twenties, and how I came away from that book with a powerful desire to keep learning and growing.  That feeling has never escaped me.  The acquisition of knowledge is what keeps life interesting and cultivates the sensation of vitality we all crave.