So what do you do? Well, I'm headed up to Cape Cod next week for a bit of Bluefish and Striper action, but closer to home, I've been hitting my favorite ponds.
Truth be told, I love fishing the ponds. At its best, it's a blast. Casting to individual fish, seeing the take. It's about as much fun as anything. Sure, most of the time the fish are pretty small. But even small bass are feisty and jump better than a rainbow of the same size. And every once in a while you can catch a 2-3 pound fish, which is nothing to sneeze at. Or even a 20 lb. carp, though most of my success with that species has taken place in the spring.
There are two ponds I fish the most. One is the Institute pond. It's a well known spot, so I don't mind mentioning it by name. I hit it twice this week, though I really didn't catch much. Yeah, a few blue gills. But most of the time I was making nice casts to put flies over bass that were happy to ignore my offerings. The other day about the fourth fly I tried was a damsel fly dry. At least the bass would stop and look at it, but none offered a take until one bass got competitive with a pod of bluegills that hit and missed. The bass showed the bluegills how to do it, thankfully. So I wasn't completely skunked in the bass department, but pretty darn close.
Today I walked up to my other favorite local pond. This one isn't well known.
It's about a mile walk from the road, so it rarely gets fished. It's also on a local hiking route, so I walk by it a lot more than I fish it. It's maybe half an acre. Even smaller now because the water is so low (the grassy verge you see below is normally under water). As you can see, there's no one here, and that's normal.
Today I was determined to both get in a walk and do some fishing, so I took the long route to the pond. Walking through some fields I first noticed an enormous number of dragonflies. I do have a dragonfly dry in my box, but these insects were huge, much bigger than my fly. And then I noticed a large number of grasshoppers, medium sized, about a #8, and decided to start with a hopper instead.
The first bass I ever caught was on a hopper. I hadn't been fishing very long, and June and I we were staying in a B&B with a little bass pond. For some reason I only had a little 3 weight rod - quite possibly I hadn't planned on fishing at all, and it's what I had in the trunk. And trout flies. So as I contemplated the pond, I tried to think through from first principles what flies might work. A little pond, surrounded by a field. Grasshopper? Why not? In the event, the first bass I cast to smashed the fly. I landed him. He was actually a pretty nice little bass, maybe a pound.
So today, as I walked through the field kicking up a little storm of live hoppers, I determined to tie one on as soon as I got to the pond, around 5:30.
Unfortunately, the sun was a little low which made it tough to see the fish. I was reduced to casting at nervous water, and likely structures. Nevertheless, on the second or third cast there was a pleasingly large splash, and a strong throb of a decent bass on the line. For a moment. Until the line went slack. Oh, yeah, I forgot. Largemouth have strong jaws. So strong that they keep you from setting the hook. You think you've got him, but the bass is just holding your fly in his mouth. After a few seconds he realizes your fly isn't food, and spits it out. With bass you kind of have to keep setting the hook, repeatedly, for several seconds, so that you set the hook when he tries to spit.
I never saw that fish, though I'm reasonably sure it would have been the largest of the day. But other fish, both bluegills and bass, were happy to hit the fly. Even casting blind I caught two small bass and a number of bluegills in about 40 minutes. Great fun.
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