Post Frontal Fishig

Today I fished with Fred on a local lake for smallies and oh how it was tough! He wanted to catch some bass on a fly rod and that’s always a challenge after a high pressure has arrived. We had thunderstorms and electricity in the air last night along with heavy rains causing a poor change in their attitude. It wasn’t that they weren’t there, just that they wouldn’t eat! Our weather today provided us with bluebird skies and tremendous winds from the W that switched to the N/W afterwards. They were also blowing at 15 to 25 knots making for an interesting day to fly fish. Air temps went into the 80’s and the water temps remained around 73 degrees as usual. Our first area proved to be an aquarium as all we could do was watch big fish swim around and not even think about taking the fly. We moved to another area and had pretty much the same thing except that Fred was able to catch a few of the small & medium ones cruising in the area, but not the real giants. He did have a few of them look like they were going to attempt to eat only to have them swim away. We stayed on this spot for a while catching a few here and there before we had enough and opted for another area further away. This didn’t work out too well as the winds were coming from the S/W here and blowing even harder causing the water to stain up really bad. I knew we wouldn’t get anything under these conditions but attempted it nevertheless. After about 15 minutes we shifted gears and decided that it was time to try some trolling for pike & walleye. This too didn’t work out too well as we caught only about 6 or so along with a smallie of about 13 inches and decided to return to our starting area before calling it a day. To our amazement, it was even windier than earlier making it even tougher than the morning to cast a fly. I really had to provide the perfect boat control in order for Fred to be able to cast without taking one of us out! He had several followers once again, but it seemed that only the little ones were eating the fly. Every time he hooked up, there would be another bigger one just following the fight right to the boat with it. Eventually he hooked into a real beauty only to have it take to the sky and throw the fly right back at us. We were both beginning to think that it wasn’t going to happen and then another bruiser decided to inhale the fly and he was finally locked up with the largest bass of the day. I wouldn’t say that it was a beast, but under the circumstances, it was quality! After a couple of quick pics before the release and we were on our way back to the ramp calling it a day. This was definitely a tough one, but all in all we were both satisfied with the end results!!