This summer was a pretty good one for me as I was able to get out more than ever and work on my casting accuracy as well as my presentation from 30 feet and beyond. I still have a long way to go, but setting a few goals at the beginning of the summer has brought me to the point where I am always fishing with an agenda. I don’t mean to sound like fishing isn’t fun or that I am trying to prove something, but every time I pick up a rod now I have firm goals that I want to accomplish.
Last Friday I decided it was the time for trout with my kids leaving for the night to stay with in-laws. I begged the wife to come, but alas she wanted to get some sleep after a long week. So I called my mother and told her I was heading to her cabin in the morning and to be ready to go at 7AM. I am lucky to have parents that have a place within spitting distance of one of our two year round trout streams in Oklahoma. Even if I am not going to stay the night I will drive for 2 hours and pick up my mom as I love fishing with her and love help putting her on fish.
Mom catching a trout on a fly was first on the agenda. She has caught some fish on a fly, even a Fresh Water Drum, but for some reason the trout had escaped her olive bugger. The outing previous to this one she had some bites, but was really getting the feel for nymphing and wasn’t able to put it all together. This weekend she did great. She got her drifts just right and while she can’t cast to the runs from 40 feet away like I tend to do she can work her way up to a good run and fish it pretty well now. The result was several missed fish, a few that got off, and finally her first trout on a fly:
I can’t wait until I make it out there in a few weeks. I think she might start to catch as many fish as I do on the Lower Illinois. I love the section of river we were fishing and it is easy for my mom to get around on without much fuss or difficult wading. The one thing that she doesn’t like is the immense amount of these beasts in the water:
You have to watch where you step in this section of the river or you might find yourself slipping on a 40”+ long nose gar. Unfortunately fishing for the gar hasn’t been the agenda as the biggest stick I have is a 6wt. That and I really want to have a waterproof Optio so I get some of those swanky underwater shots all the cool kids post these days. I plan to target the gar very soon and will report back with the results, but until then I need to decide if I can going to go with rope flies or not. On each of my last two trips I have hooked a gar with a nymph. My precious 4wt bends hard and the line starts to zip out giving my trigger finger a bit of line burn. The first time I got about a one minute fight out of the fish and I saw its huge spotted tail break surface a few times. It was a pretty big fish, but I am not an IGFA guy so landing a long nose gar that weighed 10+ pounds on 6x tippet isn’t really a skill I have down. This last outing I got the familiar short fight, but this time the gar was nice enough to give me back my fly. Of course I didn’t check my rig at all before casting again and I promptly broke off what must have been the largest rainbow I had hooked on the Lower Illinois.
Since I had gotten my most important agenda item off the list, getting my mom on a trout, I was able to really focus in on my personal goals for the trip. I recently read Active Nymphing by Rich Ostoff and have been trying to take a few things from the book to the water every time I fish (thanks to The Tennesee Valley Angler for mentioning this great book). While I am not employing Ostoff’s techniques on every cast I am branching out from my standard flies and dead drifting techniques. I have a go-to nymph I have been using this past year that has been a great producer on our Oklahoma tailwaters, but I went ahead tied up some of Ostoff’s Soft Hackle Woolly Worms and rigged it up per Osthoff’s suggestions. I began fishing spots a little bit differently trying to move the fly around rocks and objects both upstream and downstream. I still have a lot to learn about actually executing well on the water, but what I really got from the book more than anything is a different way of looking at the water and fishing it more effectively. Next time I go out I will be trying an even more Ostoff approach by going out on my own and really trying to cover 3+ miles of water in a day throwing a woolly worm in lots of interesting lies looking for big fish. I know there are some nice browns in the Lower Illinois and hopefully the hack and slash mentality Ostoff brings to fishing will serve me well.
Last on my agenda was to capture a picture of a wild rainbow in the Lower Illinois. I have never read anything about spawning in the Lower Illinois, but on the trip before this last one I am sure I caught a wild rainbow trout that was around 5” long. There is no hatchery on the river so we don’t have fish escaping and I have heard no fish with parr marks are released. It’s not unheard of for there to be spawning rainbows in Oklahoma, the wild trout in the Lower Mountain Fork are well known and I have lots of great pictures showing off their stunning colors. I wasn’t able to hook up with any young ones this trip to the Lower Illinois, but hopefully on my next trip I will find one hiding behind the same rock as I did a few weeks ago.
Fishing with an agenda isn’t about catching numbers of fish or even large fish. Going to the river with a plan in mind and trying to accomplish a few things such as improving your tuck cast, catching fish on a few different flies, or fishing some lies you wouldn’t normally try, and imparting a little action on the flies are great ways to improve your skills. This last summer I was able to set some concrete goals and while it will be some time before I reach my goals, I think I have become a much better fisherman. In the past I was always concerned about catching fish and I never really contemplated my attack on the water. It would have been a crappy day had I been skunked, but being able to go out, put my mom on a fish, and further my fishing abilities made this trip really rewarding.
October 8th, 2007