Canal Flatties

Canal Flatties

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Nasty Weather... And Unbelievable Creek Flows

    I headed up to Sugar Hollow today since they stocked it along with the North and South Forks of the Moormans. Upon arrival, I saw that the Moormans below the dam was fairly muddy, and absolutely horrendous looking, there was 3-4 feet of  flowing water in places that are normally dry...a terrible sign. But we headed up to the lake anyways to see what it looked like. We fished for half an hour or so, I saw two messed up trout that had obviously been caught, damaged, and released hanging out in a brush pile in 2 feet of water, they didn't move at all the entire time. I fished using nearly every stocked trout technique known to man, but I think the weather had the fish pretty messed up. The North Fork of the Moormans was so loud that I couldn't have heard a car honk from more than 20 yards away at best, it was incredible to see the volume of water that was moving through the normally tiny creek. Most places that I normally fish from would result in a rather quick death if I tried to go there today.  My little brother did manage too hook and lose a small trout in what we call a "cereal bowl pool", but other than that, the fish were probably too worried about not washing away to feed. When we headed back down to the lake, it started raining pretty hard, but we decided to do a little bobber fishing for bluegill. Ewing definitely out-fished me, he probably landed 20 or more bluegill, and I only landed 10. I was really concentrating on finding a school of larger fish or fish of another species... Worms 2 feet under a bobber 3 feet away from the bank is not exactly my favorite style of fishing. However, I managed to land a crappie 20 yards out at an unknown depth, on a piece of a worm with two small split shot in front of it, I just knew I had a trout when something grabbed my bait in more than 10 feet of water, but at least it wasn't another bluegill! I love big bluegill, but besides 4 or 5 massive 9-10" "bulls", everything we caught could have been eaten by a 14" largemouth.
     And there isn't much hope in the near future... The forecast for the rest of this week looks pretty terrible, so rivers are pretty much out of the question, and most ponds will be muddy, so I may be resorting to my 3 weight with anything black fished as slow as my attention span will allow me to. Who knows, maybe I will stumble upon something interesting, I'm not about to give fishing a rest because of the weather. I like to think of weeks like this as a challenge from mother nature, and to that I say: "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED". Thanks for reading!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like fishing conditions were awful. You guys must be dedicated.