Fish Sniffer On Demand Digital Edition Issue 3825 Nov 22- Dec 6 | Page 13

FRESHWATER VOL.38 • ISS. 25 Nov 22 - Dec 6, 2019 11 Catch & Release Fishing! Hook More & Bigger Fish With Flies... Sponsored by Kiene’s Fly Shop 916-483-1222 • www.Kienesflyshop.com 9550 Micron Ave. Suite B • Sacramento, CA The Fly & Bubble: The Ultimate Tool For The Spinning Gear Fly Angler By Cal Kellogg I’d like to shake the guy’s hand that invented modern spinning tackle. The modern spinning setup is light, strong, simple to use for novices and experts alike and reliability approaches 100%. If spinning gear, or any type of conventional gear has an inherent weakness it’s the inability to toss really small lightweight trout baits like flies. The best solution to the problem comes in the form of a clear plastic bobber or “casting bubble” as they’ve been dubbed by some. I call the approach the ‘ol clear bubble trick. The clear bubbles that I’m referring to are oval in shape. The bubble has a hole at either end and a tapered hollow spike wedges into those holes. Your main line can be threaded through the spike. Basic bubble rigging goes like this. Take your bubble and pull the spike out exposing the holes. Submerge the bobber in water and shake it around to force out the air and let in water. The holes are small and it can be tough to get the water to flow in so you’ll have to work at it a little. I like to fill my bobbers completely, but we’ll talk more about that in a bit. Without removing the bobber from the water, shove the hollow spike through the holes until it Fun Fly Fishing is firmly experiences for wedged, Beginners and trapping Experienced the water Anglers. inside. It’s this trapped WE TEACH water that FLY FISHING! is going to add casting weight to Steve Crosetti | 530-333-3484 • [email protected] your rig. www.mojobella.com 3810 WHAT’S HOT and started clearing the other rods… We’ll get back to the big fish in a bit, because I’ve got to share the drama that took place before we’d hit the water at about 1 pm. We’d arrived at the lake the afternoon before and hit the water to do a little scouting. We’d caught a small trout on a spoon and located some promising areas for the next morning. Our plan was to get an early start, hit the water just after sunrise and to hunt for big trout all day. Everything was going as planned until we rolled up to the West Shore boat ramp about a half hour after daylight. That’s when things went from perfect to horrible in seconds when my Suburban’s fan belt disintegrated. I didn’t know it at the time, but the tensioner wheel had failed and ate up the belt. I don’t know anything about cars save for the fact that when the fan belt is laying on the ground below the vehicle that it’s not good…LOL! Gena got on the phone and got things happening quickly. She located a garage and lined up a tow within minutes. I’d always wondered what would happen if you broke down towing a boat, now I know… Dan the tow truck man showed up with one of those giant tilting bed trucks. He unhitched the boat, winched the SUV up onto the deck of his truck and then attached the boat to the hitch on his huge tow truck. It took Dan about 15 minutes to get everything situated and off we went. When we got dropped off at the garage the mechanic told me we needed to work quickly. “This is going to be a pretty minor repair, but we’ve got to figure out what we need,” he said. “Parts come from Chico and they only deliver up here in Chester once a week. The delivery truck is set to leave Chico in a few minutes, but I’ve called and asked them to wait.” Minutes later he called in what he needed and the parts www.unclelarryslures.com were on the way. “Well the parts are coming,” he said, “but we probably MADE IN THE USA won’t get them until this afternoon. We’ll UNCLE LARRY’S LURES Great Spinners that will carry Nightcrawlers or Grubs for hungry winter Trout! Use the best, catch the best and the biggest! [phone] 3825 Next thread your main line through the hollow spike impaled in the bubble. After passing the line though the spike thread on a plastic bead and then knot on a small black swivel. Your leader will attach the other end of the swivel….We’ll get back to the leader soon. You’ve probably been wondering why I fill the bubble completely full with water? Here’s the deal. Sometimes I want to present my offering just a hair below the surface. Other times I’ll want to get it down a bit. If there is air in your bubble the bubble is going to float. That’s fine if you want to fish just under the surface, but you won’t be able to get any depth. On the other hand a full bubble has zero buoyancy. If you allow a full bubble to set in one spot without retrieving it, it will slowly sink and you can count it down. When using flies teamed with a full bubble a deadly trick is to stop your retrieve periodically and allow the bubble to sink, slowly drawing the fly down with it. Lots of times the sight of that slowly descending fly is tempting enough to turn followers into hooked fish. When I rig up for bubble fishing I use a reel spooled with standard high quality mono, but I use 6 or 8 pound fluorocarbon for my leader. I’ve used leaders as long as 5 feet and as short as 18 inches. Overall I think leaders in the 24 to 36 inch range work best. These leaders are long enough to get the bait away from the bubble a bit, but not so long as to make casting difficult. When targeting trout the number one offering you can employ is a streamer style fly that incorporates marabou. My favorites are either woolly buggers or Sep’s trolling flies. Big flies will catch fish, but if big flies fail don’t be afraid to go smaller and smaller until you get hit. In high mountain lakes I’ve found No. 14 and 16 aquatic beetle imitations to be deadly. continued from page 1 get you back on the road by the time we close tonight.. I’ll drive back to your hotel and pick you up when we are done.” Gena and I would have rather been out fishing for sure, but things were working out. Back at the hotel, we left Lucy in the room and headed out for breakfast. We’d just finished eating and were looking around in a gift shop, when the garage called. The truck was finished! The parts truck had driven directly to Chester and our garage was their first stop. The Fishing Gods were smiling down on us. The mechanic picked us up. I paid the bill and we were off to the lake. By 1 o’clock we were motoring across open water headed for the fish I’d located along the peninsula. I couldn’t believe we’d made it out on the water! Back to Gena and the big trout…. As the fish made a fierce J shaped run that culminated in a series of wild jumps, I dropped the big motor into neutral, set the Minn Kota to move us forward slowly and started reeling in the second leadcore rod. Right then the trout turned on a dime and bolted right at the boat. Gena is a veteran and she kept slack from forming in the line. I grabbed the net and got ready. “We’ve got two lines out and a down- rigger cable to deal with. We’ll probably only get one shot at landing this fish,” I said. I jumped up on the transom with the net. I could see the fish below the boat in the clear water, Gena couldn’t so she had to rely on me to tell her how to position the rod tip. The big trout was making repeated power dives between the second leadcore line and the downrigger cable. He’d surge down, lose steam against the drag and then head shake violently. I could see that he was barely hooked and my heart was in my throat. My goal was to keep Gena cranking the reel while using side pressure to keep the fish away from the downrigger cable, the motor and the other line. After a couple minutes that seemed like an hour, the big rainbow gave up and came to the surface. It crossed the other downrigger line at the last second, but it didn’t matter. I made the scoop, the spoon instantly shook free and the celebrating began! The fish was massive, just over 23 inches long and well over 5 pounds. The rainbow had tremendous girth that made its head look tiny in comparison to its huge body. It was an epic freshwater predator and true eating machine living in a lake ripe with forage. I’d like to report that we kept on trolling and kept on landing fish, but that wasn’t the case. Minutes after Gena landed her monster a hellacious wind came up and we were soon slugging through 3 and 4 foot rollers to get back to the West Shore and shelter. We trolled there for a while with zero results save for a swing and a miss on my trolling fly. With the sun slipping behind the trees, we slid the boat back on the trailer and called it a trip. Despite big wind and mechanical drama, we’d got it done. We’ll be serving Gena’s trophy wild rainbows for dinner tonight!