Chad's Excellent Flyfishing Discovery Year, in which this diehard metal-chunking, baitcaster-loving basshead attempts his redneck piscatorial pursuits wholly with the fairy wand, kicked off yesterday when I snuck off for a twenty-minute lunchtime sanity break at the local state park pond/trash dump/teenage copulation pit.
It's a nasty little hole, but I can be over there in literally less than a minute, be casting in less than three and back to the house in time to eat a sandwich and get back to work in less than thirty. For that kind of convenience I can overlook the slimy water and wormy-looking unemployed (rather than underemployed like me) guys in wifebeaters sitting on the bank with their Chinese Zebcos propped in the fork of a limb jammed into the mud, watching yellow bobbers while they diligently and completely un-ironically work their way through a case of PBR.
And I'll be damned if I didn't (alliteration alert) finally find a fun way to catch crappie. They're a useless but delicious little fish, and unless I specifically want to eat them, I rarely fish for crappie because I can achieve the same sporting effect by snagging a little bit of slimy moss.
But with the little six-foot three-weight and a Clouser minnow, it's actually kind of - dare I say - fun, in a way that catching them on even light conventional tackle never was. I caught four in quick succession and you can bet your ass I'll be back over there next week with a little more time and a stringer...
It 'aint Montana, but it's what I got...
Those little buggy-whips sure do change the game when you're catching teeny-tiny fishes, no? Wait until you try one in the blue water on something a bit more substantial!
ReplyDeleteOnce (thanks to the OWAA) I went fly fishing for crappie with Berkley Bedell.
ReplyDeleteChanged my outlook on panfish. And he was a nice, unpretentious guy too.