While running errands on Saturday I stopped by Big Rock Creek to see if it was worth coming back to on Sunday. Though a little high and cloudy, it appeared to be in very good condition. Should have fished then. I've written numerous times over the years how the carp and suckers are the first to migrate up creeks to spawn. Up until Saturday, Big Rock had been devoid of fish. Now they were swimming in the huge schools that spanned the width of the creek. This migration is impressive when it gets this big.
It's for this fish migration, virtually all species will migrate up a creek given the chance, that I've pushed in the past to have a dam removed on Blackberry creek, not far east of Big Rock. On Blackberry, a dam sits about a quarter mile in from where the creek meets the Fox River and is about 8 feet tall. In this creek during the spring and fall fish migrations, yes fish migrate in the fall, I've caught numerous species all the way up to the dam. Walleye, smallmouth, largemouth, muskie, suckers, bluegills, crappie and others all come and go with the highest concentration during the spring spawning runs. Remove the dam and imagine what this could do for those fish populations.
And then there's the dams on the Fox itself blocking fish migrations, but I digress and waste my breath on this issue.
Two weeks earlier there were no fish to be seen this far up the creek. But on that day I had also stopped at the mouth of Big Rock in a failed effort to catch something. What I remember though is that while I was fishing I was dragging my lure over fish. It's usually carp and suckers when I can feel them while reeling and this was verified with the occasional carp or sucker scale coming back attached to the hook.
On Saturday another fisherman was just entering the creek for a few hours of fishing. We sat on the guard rail overlooking the creeek, comparing stories of our ventures on this and other creeks in the area. We watched the carp and suckers weave their way up stream in slow motion waves. I was envious of his choice of fishing time. I knew storms would be rolling through the area all day and into Sunday morning. Sunday could be a wash out.
All day Saturday, Saturday night and till noon on Sunday the storms mostly tracked north of my house by about 2 miles. I hear that these storms dumped 3 to 4 inches of rain in the creek watersheds north of the Fox. When I finally got to Big Rock Creek early afternoon on Sunday, the creek had come up 8 inches, turned to mud and had a clarity of about 3 inches. But I was here, I've caught fish in mud before, I may as well give it a try. Besides, the pond I've been hitting is right near by, so if all else failed I could pick a few fish out of there.
As I was suiting up a guy drove up on an ATV.
"Have you seen a cat?" I thought he said.
"A cat? Man, you'll never find a cat in all this brush."
"No, a calf. A two day old calf. It wandered away and I'm trying to find it," he corrected.
I knew there was a cattle ranch/farm about a mile away and I assumed this is where it came from. I told him I'd get in touch with the police if I saw it. The guy wasn't gone more than a minute than I hear the calf cry, bleat, moo or whatever it is they do. I spent a few minutes hacking through the thick underbrush look for the thing when I had to give up. There was no way I was going to get through that stuff. Since I didn't hear it again, I chalked it up to my imagination. I must just be hearing things.
Back to fishing.
Wading across the creek was completely out of the question. This is the stretch that was completely altered weeks ago during a flood. In the visits I've made here this year the creek level has yet to come down to where I feel comfortable wandering aimlessly through the water like I usually do. Even when it was clear a couple of weeks ago, there were new areas where you can no longer see the bottom. Was never like that before. As daring as I may seem when it comes to wading creeks, I'm not so dumb as to walk through muddy water not knowing where my next foot is going to land. Unless it's 90 degrees out and I care less about taking a bath.
I opted to walk a shore I had never walked before all the times I've fished here. It's not so much that I didn't want to, it has been virtually impassable till now. One of the benefits of the flood is that it did a pretty good job of clearing out the shore. The water had not only scoured away almost everything along the shore, but the water had pushed so far in with so much force that it had cleared out quite a bit of the undergrowth.
But it still wasn't that easy.
I walked, climbed and sometimes crawled along in order to stay above the creek. Big trees were jutting out into the creek barely holding onto land with their roots. I balanced myself on root balls and clung to overhanging limbs in order to reach out far enough to drop lures tight into all the new cover.
If the fish were there, I would have caught them. I've been doing this kind of in-the-fishes-face type of fishing for too long to have been missing the spot where the fish has to sit in this kind of water and cover. I had planned on hiking far down the creek, but changed my mind at the first bend. In order to get to where I wanted to go I would eventually have to cross the creek.
So I went and fished the pond.
A few casts, a couple of small largemouths and I almost trip over a nesting goose. When on it's nest, a goose is almost fearless. It simply puts it's head down, hisses at you and start walking in your direction hissing the whole time. I gave it a wide berth, which was too bad because it had it's nest along the best fishing spot.
A couple of more fish and I decided to go do something completely different for me. Something I normally don't enjoy.
I wound up at Silver Springs State Park and fished that heavily pressured lake. It had turned out to be a beautiful afternoon so I just took my time and a couple of hours and only fished the south side of the lake. Old habits die hard when you're out fishing, so at first I threw things that I knew wouldn't catch me anything, a twister and a senko look-a-like. Not even the bluegills would look at either one of them. You could see the bass all over the place cruising the shorelines or just sitting sunning themselves, but they wouldn't even look at what was being tossed into the water.
I watched others fishing the lake throw spinnerbaits and crankbaits and catch nothing. They obviously have bad habits to break too. People need to quit reading (B)AssMaster magazine, probably one of the sources of these bad habits. Since I don't read any of the main stream fishing rags, I just need to quit being so stupid. I know better.
After about five minutes of looking down into clear water it came to me like a smack in the head. Rock bottom lake, duh.
I tied on a YUM crayfish, why use tubes that mimic crayfish when you can tie on a tube that looks like a crayfish, and dragged it across the bottom. Picked up 7 largemouth in a couple of hours. The first one I caught convinced me I made the right decision to use the crayfish. The rim of its mouth was rubbed raw, a sure sign that it was digging through the rocks looking for what I was throwing.
The bonus catch was a 16 inch invasive species rainbow trout that inhaled the crayfish. Since I don't agree with the stocking of these things in waters where they don't belong, and I refuse to buy the inland trout stamp, I gave it to a guy and his kids that had a stamp. Otherwise it was going into the woods when no one was looking, a treat for the night critters that would eventually have found it.
The largemouth ranged from 10 to 15 inches. I didn't bother taking pictures of any of them. They just didn't have the look I was looking for. The colors just weren't what I wanted. I'm more interested in capturing what they look like rather than what they are. Everyone knows what a fish looks like. I'm going for the look of the fish, what makes it worth fishing for and catching. More to that than capturing it's size in a picture.
Match the hatch is a saying that fly guys like to say a lot when rummaging through there collection of hair balls with hooks. Like it has no real meaning to those of us that use reels that spin. That's all I've ever done on river or lake. Match the hatch, or better yet, if you were a fish, what would you be eating?
The on again, off again rains that occur this time of year are going to continue to make a mess of the river and the creeks that feed it. I don't see any of them coming down soon and that pretty much sucks. I'm bored with fishing the river at high water and I don't want to be a pond fisherman. Next thing you know I'll be wandering banks of abused ponds with all my gear in a 5 gallon bucket. Lawn chair in the other hand. Maybe a six pack cooler. A gut that says I'm 50 pounds overweight, I eat too much, don't exercise and look like I'm ready to give birth to something big.
Scary thought. It better quit raining soon.