First Fish of the year!

February 26 was a good day. It was a quick after work trip but it was fruitful.

For those of you that follow me regularly, you know that this year I have committed myself to learning more about fly fishing by fly fishing more; what a concept. Specifically, that means that most of the time when I am out fishing, I will be taking my fly rod instead of my spinning rod and putting myself in positions where I have no other option but to fly fish more. After this trip, this decision has been completely justified. 

This was a last minute trip that I almost canceled because of work. As it turns out work ended up not getting in the way so I called up Jeremy and our trip was back on. This was before daylight savings time so we had about 2 hours to fish. 

We arrived at a park pond in Davis that I will refer to as “Davis pond,” at about 4:30. I assembled my 6 wt and went to work testing areas of the pond that looked fishy. It is a small pond so the walk around the pond wasn’t too bad. I finally found an area close to an island surrounded by cattails at the center where there seems to be a steep drop off into deeper water. 

So while others were fishing the main body of the pond, I went to work on this drop off with a black wooley bugger… no takers. After a while I started noticing mosquitoes landing on top of the water. I quickly looked through the flies I had on me and the closest thing I could find to a mosquito looking pattern was a light cahill.  I gave it a try and no takers as it sat on top of the water… but then it sank. After a few seconds, I had a taker! A few moments later I brought the first fish of the year to hand, a small bluegill. 

At one point, Jeremy, who I am teaching to fly fish decided he wanted to give the fly a try. He took my fly rod and after a brief casting tutorial, tried to catch fish on the fly. Meanwhile, he hands me his fishing rod, a small 5 foot rod with 2 lb test line on it. It was rigged up with a texas rigged worm. I moved out of the way to give him room to cast and took the 5 foot rod. In my first cast I tossed the worm into cattails and as it bumped off of the cattails and hit the water, a bass took it in its mouth and I reeled the fish in! A nice 1 ½ - 2 lb fish. 

I continued to cast and ended up moving down to the main body of the pond. At one point I stated noticing the fish were surface feeding so I tossed my light cahill in that area. One fish ended up breaking off my fly so I tied on another and continued. I finally got one taker and brought in my third fish of the day, a nice little bass at about a pound. After that another fish broke my fly off and at that point it was too dark to tie on another. I ended the day having caught the only 3 fish of the day and all on the fly! 

We ended the night with some casting lessons in a parking lot. Since then, Jeremy received a Cabelas wind river Combo as a birthday present and he is already talking about buying a float tube in the future. I think we have a new fly fisher on our hands, folks! Haha another believer in the gospel of fly fishing! 

Total Fish: 2 Largemouth bass + 1 bluegill = 3 Fish