Pond fishfest

On Friday I took my son and youngest daughter to the same pond we went to last weekend. The day turned out to be a very warm day with temperatures reaching into the 90s. We waited until about an hour before sunset to start fishing as by then there was some shade available and the fish should be eager to bite.

Earlier in the day, we had stopped at a trading store in town and picked up some red worms and so this was the primary bait for today. It took my son a while to figure out how to keep the worms from falling off the hook. Eventually, once he did, he caught his first fish of the day; a small bluegill.

My son continued catching bluegills pretty steadily. They were small at first and progressively got bigger. There are some really big 'gills in that pond! We also saw a huge crawfish walking along the shoreline.

My daughter found a friend to play with at the pond. Another gentleman had showed up at the pond to fish and brought his daughter that looked to be 4 or 5. My daughter, being a socialite, went over to make a new friend and they basically ran around the pond searching for plastic lures and playing with the worms.

Since my son was doing really well on his own, I decided to take my 4wt to fish along with him. I was using a size 8 Cypert minnow fly and caught so many bluegills in the 7" to 9" size that I lost count. We did catch one small green sunfish but primarily the pond was filled with healthy bluegill. I did also catch one small bass and I figure there are much larger bass in there but I didn't managed any.

Sunset came around and it started getting dark. My son didn't want to leave. As the frogs started to sing, I switched over to a small Gurgler top water fly and as soon as it hit the water, I caught another big bluegill. Eventually I couldn't see my cast around 8:20pm and I told the kids it was time to leave. My son asked me if I had any of my headlamps in the truck so we could keep fishing. I told him we would come back some other day.

While I was packing up the rods and the worms, the kids rolled each other down the steep grass embankment.

I intend to take the kids one more time this weekend before their spring break vacation comes to an end. It is supposed to be pretty windy today with gusts in the 20 to 30mph category. I hope not since that pond would be great to try my 2wt on. I'll post up later as to how today's trip went. Hopefully, it will be as good or better than Friday's.