My Dad's First Cast of the Year

After the inadvertent catch earlier this week, I returned to the lake today for another go at fly fishing.  I caught a few thousand blue gills that were too small to keep.  Pretty Annoying.  I then caught an eleven inch crappie.  Look at how pretty it is:

     My dad got his pole out to try his hand.  I told him that they were biting on smaller stuff.  He had the standard rubber nightcrawler with three hooks.  He said he was just playing.

His first cast landed him this bass, which is just over 18 inches:

I asked him what he did to deserve the big fish.  He said that he pays the mortgage.  

Fair enough.   Good work, good start to the season.

First Fish on a Fly...A New Day is Dawned

The wonders of senior year are a stressful senior paper matched with a few general education classes that happened to be left until the last semester.  Those gen eds are ceramics, soccer, and fly fishing.  Fly fishing is the one I have been looking forward to the most.

Hemmingway:  "Anyone can be a fisherman in May."

Me:  "Yeah, but its March and too cold and they still bite for me."

After only two class meetings for fly fishing, coach let us take the school's  rods and reels how to practice casting.  I decided that I wanted to learn on our lake, so I purchased a leader and some flies.  The leader got tangled (ok, I tangled it) while I was tying it to the fly backing.  It took me over an hour to de-tangle, leaving 13 minutes for time on the water.  Typical enough.

I managed to push enough line out to where fish would be if it had been warmer than 40º.  The rhythm is funny, and the motion weird for someone who has been slinging heavy bass baits out from the time he could grasp a pole.  

"10, 2...10, 2"  After getting the fly caught on the grass behind me a few times, I managed to put the fly down in the water.  It was a less-than-delicate presentation, but it got out there.  Time was up.  I started reeling back the line that I had let out.  There was resistance.  I pulled up on the line and a small blue gill came to the surface.

It was not bigger than the length of my hand, but I didn't deserve it anyway.