A Day on the Water

Good no wind morning. I shot video of bass hitting poppers on my phone.  Finished with 16 bass 15 to 20 inches.  Most were on 3/0 White Marabou Bangers, a few on the Chartreuse version.  3 small pike ate poppers, hate that.  Some more very big bass came to the popper in the early evening without getting the hook.        

At the most popular spot on the Big Manistee River.  Very few people above the coffer, more below.  Salmon were jumping and I foul hooked several while hanging beads or jigs under a bobber.  I caught one 9Lb king, fair hooked on a Big Hole Demon Pattern Jig. Steelhead I got one 22 inch silver hen on a #6 Pink Head Olive Rubber Legs Jig pattern.  She made slashing runs and leaps. Trout I briefly hooked about 6 hard shaking 12 inch brown trout on 8mm painted Yellow Glow Beads, only landed one of  those.

Creating flies with a good walk the dog, side to side action has been an obsession for me for the last decade.   Except for the 6/0 Banana Dog, most of these Patterns were only partly successful. Typically one tie could have a good side to side darting action when retrieved with the right rhythm of short snappy strips.  Trying to duplicate that result by replicating the effective fly would typically fail.  One tie of the 5/0 Silver Bullet had a great action that worked at different cadences, 60 feet out to 10 inches from the rod tip.  For some flies...

I briefly tried a Foam Diver and a big Black Marabou Banger. A Chartreuse Banger was getting rushed but no hookups. Then this smaller 2/0  Black Creature Popper was getting hit and hooking fish.  The first one worth a picture was this best of the year 22 inch bass that fought hard in the giant lily pads, wrapping the 15 pound leader around those unbreakable stems.   The midday slump hit and I tried chartreuse again before a 3/0 White Marabou Banger got a few hits from mostly small fish.  In some clearer water with small minnows, a small 2/0 White Marabou Banger...

On the long padIe downstream from the launch in Saint Johns Marsh, I tried for largemouth in some new to me shallow weedy bays and some seawall spots, nothing there.  Nearer the mouth of the North Channel, the current flowed briskly over deep, partially weeded flat. Drifting along the 8 foot contour, casting Poppers out across the current toward 12 or 15 ft depths near the edge of the much deeper central channel.  On the first drift the White 3/0 Marabou Banger got hit by a very big, hard fighting smallmouth that shook the hook on the first high jump.  I stopped to set...