Flymen Blog
During these frigid winter months I often find myself thinking about something dear to me – smallmouth fishing.
If you're like me, you miss the warm sun on your back and the bend of a 8wt rod with a bronzeback on the other end.
It doesn't have to be over for us. There is still bass fishing around.
Granted, the cold and brutal conditions of winter do not make it easy to put in the time it takes to locate and fish for these guys. I have found myself questioning my own sanity many times over. It’s a part of being a die-hard fly angler.
With that being said, here are some tactics that I have found helpful for cold-weather smallmouth fishing.
An articulated streamer from Kelly Galloup.
The Flatliner is a flat horizontally profiled fly. Cool stuff!
On an early Saturday morning last May, something remarkable happened while inshore fly fishing along Southern California's rocky Palos Verdes coast.
I landed 2 spectacular fish on flies; the first, a 9.4-pound calico bass on 12-pound tippet, then less than an hour later, I sight casted to and landed a 36-pound white sea bass on 20-pound tippet, both official IGFA fly fishing world records.
A record-breaking morning I'll never forget.
Here's the story of the calico bass I caught on that crazy once-in-a-lifetime morning on my go-to articulated sculpin fly, tied with a small brown Fish-Skull Sculpin Helmet.
These fish are flat out amazing and if you haven’t been fly fishing for them, you're missing out!
This fall marks the tenth year I’ve engaged in the madness known as fly fishing for false albacore.
I remember my first few trips chasing albies up and down Shackleford and Cape Lookout in North Carolina, all which ended in frustration, not due to a lack of opportunities, but mainly because I had not yet paid my dues and learned the ins and outs of catching these fish.
Somewhere around my third trip, I hooked into my first Albacore on fly. That 20-pound fish took every bit of my backing, and the event is still etched in my mind to this day.
10 years down the road and a ton of albies later, I’m hoping these tips will make your first few outings a little more successful than mine.
Everything we create in the search to fool fish is an imitation of life, a suggestion of realism.
A size 16 Adams, a 4/0 Flashabou streamer, and even a #14 Husky Jerk are all attempts to convey the same thing to the fish we target with them — that they are food.
How closely they imitate life, and how well they suggest their intended identity are what make flies successful, or not.
What I want to discuss is a simple idea, and this idea applies to every fly, lure, and flure that has, or ever will exist. The idea is in regards to a predator's search image, and its impacts on design and design simplicity.
What is a search image?