Saturday was opening day of bass season in New York State. The day started with beautiful sunshine and no wind. It was my first real chance to do some serious kayak fishing with Ben.
We decided our best chance to land some really big bass would be the wide waters of the Erie Canal. This canal connects many small inland creeks and the Finger Lakes outlets with Lake Erie and the Hudson River. The Erie canal is filled by spring rain runoff. After the state opens the locks on May 1st most of the spillways are loaded with spawning Walleye, Pike, Smallmouth and Largemouth bass, also including white Perch and Shad. This is a main waterway these fish use to get to the smaller creeks. The Wide Waters provide habitat and food for non-resident bass to hold all year long. After the canal is drained in the winter these fish move out with the receding water. Ben and I were not sure what our catch might be, but our intent was to land some bass on opening day. Ben started with casting lures and I planned on catching bass with a trusted frog popper on the fly rod.
We got an early start at 6:00 A.M. and Ben started catching bass around 8:00.
I was not even getting hits.
I did manage a few tie ups with the trees on shore. It was a learning experience using the fly rod in the kayak, but less difficult than one would think. We had been fishing in 4 to 7 feet of water near the shoreline with only a couple of fish on. As the sun began to invade the shadows, I changed my tactics. We paddled to the opposite side of the wide waters near the boat docks. I found a patch of lily pads in 2 to 3 feet of water with a weedy bottom. I fished around some downed timber and hooked a nice bass. This too was interesting how the fish would pull me and my kayak as I reeled it closer. Being so proud of taking one on the fly, I turned around only to see Ben also had hooked one. I paddled over so as to get photos of our double catch and netted them both in the same net. Ben's bass was 17 inches and mine filled the bottom of the net with a 15 inch length. Ben had the greatest success with 5 landed and a few lost, including one much larger fish than the ones we had netted. I caught one other 8 inch bass. I was glad to have accomplished what I had set out to do.
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| Double in the net. |
Using the fly rod and poppers was the ticket for a fun morning kayaking on the Erie Canal.
And like the song goes…..
Low bridge, everybody down,
Low bridge, we must be getting near a town
You can always tell your neighbor,
You can always tell your pal,
If he's ever been fishing on the Erie Canal.
Later that day…. In the afternoon I scouted out a few of my traditional fishing holes. The lack of rain these past few weeks had reduced the water flow in my favorite summer creek quite a lot. I tried a few streamers and dry flies, which produced nothing more than a creek chub.
And again as my opening day progressed, I made plans to meet up with my friend Kevin for some evening fly fishing. We only had a couple of hours, so we met at a small fish pond. The pond holds sunfish and bass through the winter. Kevin wanted me to teach him how to fly fish. So I started with some basics, telling him about different weight rods. I explained fly lines and how the weight of the line is what gets the fly to where you want it to go. I explained how to string a rod and found out he is a southpaw. So right off the bat he was at a disadvantage because my reels are all wound for right hands. None of this talk was going to catch fish. So we tied on a dry fly and I started him on reacting to fish strikes.
At waters' edge I got Kevin to hold the fly just above the water so that one of the multitude of little bluegills would hit on it. Before long they were jumping out of the water for the fly. His first bluegill came after a few delayed hook sets, his second soon after. We took a photo opp, and I dropped the thee inch fish into the water.
To our surprise, a monster largemouth bass darted out from under some cover and swallowed the dazed fish. That got the adrenaline pumping. I took another rod that had the frog popper from the morning and swapped rods with Kevin. He dropped the popper in the water near the bass, and with my expert advice started twitching it.
Within minutes I heard, "I got it!!"
The fight was crazy confusing trying to direct Kevin to use the right hand reel and keep tension on the rod and well, you know what I mean.So he landed it and I took some photos of Kevin's first largemouth bass on the fly. The fish measured 17.5 inches. After this, we continued with some casting instruction until just about dusk. There were no more bites that evening, unless you consider the one that hooked Kevin for life! He got the fly fishing bug really bad.
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| Wouldn't you if the third fish you caught was a lunker like this one? |
