In Which I Learn That I Have In Fact Caught the World's Largest Minnow

'em mystery fish turn out to be, thanks to the guy fishing for carp with oatmeal at the dam yesterday, fallfish.

They're the largest member of the minnow family. I think sometimes these get called chub, or suckers, and the mouth still doesn't look right for what I was catching. Whatever.

I thought that when I left my camera at home yesterday I'd be sure to catch a monster, and have no way to take a picture. Instead, I also forgot my pliers, so that meant I had half a dozen 3" redbreast sunfish take all three treble hooks. You can't even just yank the hooks out and kill the fish because they're too little, and you can't get ahold of them. All released, more or less ok, after my deft surgical skills were called into play. And it rained some, which was good. Total: 3 bass under 8", maybe 20 redbreast sunfish.

I'm taking two days off, fo'reals, 'til I have time to go somewhere a little more productive.

Fishing with kids, pt 1

I'm chomping at the bit to get out to Douthat, but I think I'll have to wait until B&C get back--got some work that needs my attention, and I can't justify taking two and a half hours out to drive out there and probably end up fishing for about an hour. So, to pacify my urge, I'm going to write up the first of many thoughts on this topic.

I've had kind of a learning curve on this myself, so I wanted to pull together and distill my experience over the past few years with getting my kids started on fishing.

First principle of fishing, and of teaching kids to fish: you must be fishing where there are fish. No amount of the right bait, tackle, technique, or lucky turban will make up for an absence of live scaled swimmers in the water.

Kid specific subpoint a. For first trips, there should be a lot of easy to catch fish. I had four blanked trips w/ B before we got it together. He lasted around 7-12 minutes each time, had no fun, was very frustrated, and didn't want to try again for a while between. I think I might have had 1-2 more shots at it when we went out to the pier on Emerald Isle and laid waste to the pinfish. He was really excited to catch dozens of those little guys, and to do it again the next day, and then he was, um, hooked, especially when we laid into something a little bigger.
Looking back now I realize that C & I also went exclusively on high-productivity trips when she was starting.

subpoint a. little 1. got to be ready to spend some money on this to make it happen.
subpoint a. little 2. sunscreen.
subpoint a. little 3. water and snacks. Early on the kid will ask for this him/herself. If you're doing well, you'll have to start remembering for 'em. Also, I'll fish 5 hours without eating, drinking, or peeing, and your kid will too--but s/he will be all tore up at the end, and need you to fix it. Prepare and prevent.
subpoint a. little 4. be ready for a trip of any duration--don't insist on staying longer than your kid wants, and don't lock into a 12 hour trip on day one, but also be ready to put in 3-4 hours if it's going well. From my own experience as a 7yo, nothing sucks worse than having to go home when they're finally biting--and that taints fishing as a crummy time.

Lots more to say here, but another time--gotta keep y'all coming back somehow.

RLFC meeting at the East Lexington Bridge

That'd be the Runty Little Fish Club. I had to switch up my strategy tonight because the fishing was too easy, and I was catching too many dinky bluegills. It was every cast for a while there, on the Torpedo, a Rapala Minnow, and the 'hopper. The night's catch also included two that I think Mike will identify for me, including this one that I think could be a perch, and has a bad sense of perspective, as in can't tell what's bigger or smaller than itself.
Here's his older brother. Looks kinda like a smallie, but the body is so narrow that I don't know. Maybe there's some piscegenation going on in the river.
Pretty fish, though.
The first one of the night was definitely the biggest, and bigger than all the sunnies I caught last night.


Maybe that's not him. The one I'm thinking of was dessert plate sized, maybe 3/4 lb. A real lunker.

To produce the phenomenology of this experience, here's something I read online:

The Four Phases of Fishing:
1. I just wanna catch a fish.
2. I wanna catch a lot of fish.
3. I wanna catch a big fish.
4. I wanna catch 'em on my terms.

Tonight we got to #2, but I'm definitely a #3/#4 kind of guy at this point. Better than getting skunked, and better than scrubbing out the garbage can.

Total: 3 bass*, 10 bluegill, 2 mysteryminnows.

*At this size, I think its hard to say whether they're small, large, rock, green, or what. I'll know by mid-day tomorrow.

Edit: The 'fusiform' two were smallies. I'm guessing, based on coloration and dorsal fin, that the other three were spotted bass. Who knows?

Why am I not fishing here?

This article in one of the Tidewater area papers shows an incredible number of blue catfish coming up to the surface after fisheries scientists put a DC current pulse in the water. If these guys are concerned about the population of blue cats damaging other species in that fishery, I could see my way clear to getting rid of some of them for 'em.

Monday Sep. 20--Smallie-smalls in the Maury

Mike put me onto a place off Stuartsburg Road, just before the Maury connects with the South River. Mookie and I caught about 10 juvenile smallmouth bass

and while none was over 9" or 3/4 lb [see pic of lure below for scale], they were enthusiastic. Hard fighters, fun on microspin, and a couple even jumped. So, no trophies, but I also learned a few things.

Mookie, however, did not:

"Hey--did you see that fish? I think you did, because you were holding it in one of your paws. It was just here. Where did it go?"

1. I fished with a grasshopper lure all night. This should be a topwater bait, and I got some decent strikes, but I also put it in the right spot about 60 times and didn't get a thing. On the other hand, I started retreiving it, because G-d knows why, but it has a crankbait blade on the front

and it swims in a way that, apparently, juvenile smallies can't resist. I think I caught 8 fish on underwater strikes and 1 or 2 on topwater. This lure also has bad hooks--small, which is good for these mighty minnows, but a drag to unhook, and really, after a few messes, I wanted single hooks. I was able to identify a repeat customer because of some hook damage, and I don't feel good about that.

The nice thing is that this is a dual-phase bait--one on top, and then again underwater. Plus it has some instant results for guys like me with short attention. After 10 seconds, if you don't have a topwater strike, you're not getting it, so start swimming, cuz smallies love, um, swimming grasshoppers.


I also took a long time getting the camera out for the first one, and this one flopped into the dirt. Sorry, little guy.

2. Smallies like to hide on the upstream side of rocks.

3. I probably need waders to get into some thicker water. A bigger fish wants bigger cover and a little more water.

4. Mookie just really doesn't get it, but he does ok for a fishing dog.
"Honestly...ok, look, I know I'm not like a genius, or, you know, um, at all smart--but really, there was a fish here! I know, cuz you trew it in da water! And now it's gone! WTH?!? Ooh, look, a squir-"

Also, I'm trying to keep a low web profile until job season is over, but if you want the picture of my stunning muscles [in spite of a cruddy workout today, stalled at 105 on OHP, but squatted over my body weight for 5x5 for the first time] and a fish alongside, you could ask.

9/19 = blanked

I guess I should have figured when I forgot the camera, but then I missed the turn-off, and drove all the way off into Deliverance country before I figured that out, and by the time I got to Lake Robertson it was 6:40. Add to that that they close "ALL GATES" at 7, so no time to get a canoe, and it all amounts to no fish. One strike, and a couple looks from some ~12" bass, but o/w, skunkage. Too much bragging yesterday, or maybe the fish just don't participate if there's nothing in it for them in terms of photos and web exposure.

9.19 a.m., skunked in the Maury by E Lex bridge

Couple other guys were throwing soft plastics with similar results. I got a half dozen strikes on the Torpedo, but nothing with a mouth big enough to eat it. Might go out to Lake Robertson tonight for an hour and a half if I get enough work done first. .5 hours, 0 fish. meh.

Great day at Mike's

Honestly one of the best days of fishing I've ever had. Ben and I left home at 7am, got to Mike's at about :10 after, and had lines in the water by 7:15. Ben abandoned his homemade 5" clay plug after one cast--I think he just wanted to say he'd fished his own creation.

We got reset on good old hook-splitshot-bobber-and-a-worm, and Ben's first strike was an explosive one. The bobber disappeared, and the line snapped within a few seconds. Particularly impressive because I don't think his zebco 404 has anything less than 8# test on it. Perhaps this was a gargantuan grass carp, maybe the line was old, coulda been a big trout, and prolly ol' Ben had the rod tip pointed at the fish. It's not easy when you're 4'1".

We got retied up [and we should say here that 1st mate Dad did all the tying and Ben did all the fishing for most of this time] and soon enough Ben had another of Mike's signature monster hybrid sunfish:

I missed the picture of this last time, just fish in hand and head of boy, so I was glad to catch this one. I threw out a grasshopper crankbait a couple times, and had 1-2 decent topwater strikes, but on the whole, pretty slow action. Buster rolled up a hand-sized red-ear sunfish that looked like the washout of the 3rd or 4th generation of the hybrids Mike originally stocked, almost like a crappie.

By 8:00 the sun was up far enough to be bugging me as we faced southeast, so we took to the southeast side of the pond [it's probably less than an acre, this pond, spring fed and dammed to make a ~5-8ft deep catchment] and I cast Ben out while I goofed around trying to figure out what to throw next. He nabbed another red-ear crappie-patterned sunfish, and I eventually got on a Haddon Torpedo, frog pattern with a propeller that never got to do much work.

I zinged this thing about 80 yards across the pond with my new microspinning combo [20.95 at Walmart], and maybe I was providing guide service on how much slack to take up, but I missed a topwater strike--never even tried to set the hook. So I plopped it down in the same spot, and got a massive hit. After dragging what I was sure was a bass halfway across the pond, I pulled up a 20" 2+lb rainbow trout. Ben took the picture:

That worked well enough that I thought we ought to try it again, even though it was pushing 9 and we needed to get home for Yom Kippur [I was atoning for something, I'm sure, by taking my Jewish son fishing]. I put the Haddon back down on the far side of the pond, just off the weedline, and handed Buster the pole. He took up the slack, got a nice strike, set the hook, and after a long, drawn out fight with two aerial explosions, he had a decent sized largemouth bass:

This apparently equaled the earlier outing for bluefish, because he was quite impressed with his catch.
So, Mike put us into the fish, I had some success with artificials, and I had the great reward of watching Ben haul in a keeper sized largemouth. 3 sunfish, 1 largemouth bass, 1 rainbow trout.
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