I left work early around 4:30pm and went to a nearby park that has three retention ponds and a small spring fed lake. I brought along my TXL 2wt since the target was going to be brim.
There was quite a bit of algae in the retention ponds but I could still see some brim and occasional bass moving about. I was able to catch a couple dozen redbreasts and greenies up to about 6" and caught a few small bass up to about 7". I walked around the larger pond and saw several larger bedding bass but none would take anything I dropped in front of them. I also saw some really large brim but only managed to hook one which I lost on a log.
As the sun was setting I walked over to the main lake and cast about the shore until I got to a bend and start getting hit after hit by fingerling to 6" bass. The area must have been loaded with them because for the next hour it was almost a hit on every first or second cast. The longest I went without landing one was four casts. I must have caught 40 small bass on a #14 bead head nymph.
I did determine that while the TXL is great for short easy casts up to 30 feet, it was a chore casting that weighted nymph on that 2wt line farther than that. Luckily all the baby bass were pretty close to shore hidden among the algae.
During a point where I was unhooking a small bass, a really big bass made a wake up to shore possibly chasing some of the fingerlings for a snack.
I ended up leaving them biting which was a good feeling in a way. Next time I need to take the TXL on a trip to the San Gabriel river and find pools with bigger bass to test it on.
2 comments:
Sounds like fun.
How were you fishing the nymph btw? I'm used to drifting nymphs in rivers but not sure what to do with them in stillwater.
Hey Dean, since the water is fairly shallow and has some algae in it, I used a slow, steady retrieve to keep it below the water and any floating algae yet above the bottom and the algae there.
On the lake where all the little bass were, I used a faster retrieve. Bass tend to like fast retrieves on subsurface flies (particularly minnow type flies).
In a river, I usually like to get help from the current and when targeting bass or brim I will cast right along the bank which is usually the most obvious cover for those species on a river.
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