The Wall, The Heat, and Being the FLY

FRIDAY July 9, 2021 -The Wind basically wipe the month of June off my fishing diary with high winds and ambiguous wind predictions.   The best fishing of the month was when I challenged the wind predictions and won.   Today was one of those days.    The wind predictions have consistently predicted a small windows  of calm between 11 and 1 most every day in June.    On really hot days,  that window seems to be bigger which is a good bet if you dont die of heat stroke or dehydration.   There were some great fishing reports last weekend on Saturday but the window was pretty small and I missed fishing the entire 4th of July weekend.   Vaughn and others got out a day and reported that the fishing was great and there were fish on the wall.  I love fish on the wall and its been years since I focused on the rocks.    I tried to fish on the 4th of July and made a huge mistake.   The parking lot was full and the trailer parking was crammed with non trailers.  I spent 2 hours on the road in the heat driving up and back just to walk Kimmie the dog  around the lake .  Don told me that the weeds in the forebay were thinned out with herbicides in May but they have seemed to overrun the Forebay despite.   I was optimistic that I could find fish cruising the weed lines.     August last year was prime time on the forebay with tons of topwater and fish cruising the weed lines in the channels and flats.   Hoping for some of that action,  I returned to the channel and threw topwater plugs looking for fish to throw floating flies too but couldn’t find any.   I threw clousers  around the channel but the fishing was slow.   This last covid  season,   I’ve noticed that the forebay seems to hold the the same density of fish most of the year  and that they  just redistribute themselves in different parts of the compound in different seasons and conditions.   In other words,  the fish are always somewhere and It’s a matter of using the panoptix to find them.   Typically,   if you find the food,  you find the fish.     Today,  I found them on the wall across from the Medeiros Ramp pounding on minnows.

I fished the length of the rock wall fishing 80 feet out and casting to the edge of the weedbeds,  The fishing was non stop from 12:30 to 5:00 and I landed  at least 30 good sized stripers before leaving at 5:00 when the heat got unbearable at 110 degrees.   It felt like the temps were in the 100s all day with very little breeze.    I found myself talking to myself and feeling a bit dizzy in the afternoon.  Heat stroke can be insidious and the symptoms sort of mimic having a good day fishing..

  • Altered mental state or behavior. Confusion, agitation, slurred speech, irritability, delirium, seizures and coma can all result from heatstroke.

I knew I had to force electrolytes and I drank liters of liquids all day long.     I used a size one Yellow and burnt orange  gold flashtail clouser  with a pulse disc on my Douglas Sky G 8wgt casting a 28 foot T14 head on 29 lb  Cortland Braided Running line. I saw some fish working the inside of the weed beds today chasing minnows in a foot of water.   Also   I occasionally observed  school of one inch minnows jumping  out of the water.   Im thinking that the minnows like that Medeiros wall because of the outflow current concentration.   I didn’t see minnows anywhere else today.

A technique I like to use to cut the monotony of casting and stripping on a slow day is to pretend to “be the fly ” when I’m stripping.      I pretend that I’m trying to swim to the boat without getting eaten.   I imagine the depth I’m at and where the danger is coming from.    I try to imagine getting away from a striper and how I would swim.   There is a rhythm to the way stripers hit a fly and if you concentrate,  you can feel very light hits and tail swipes from fish trying to kill you as you strip in which allows you to anticipate when fish hit the fly.   Some fishermen have a fish sense — they channel the fish and can feel there mood and hunger.  I like pretending to be the fly,   It keeps the retrieves alive and definitely improves your catch to cast ratios.

I should have been  leaving for CUBA tomorrow but Covid still is sabotaging my fishing plans.   With all the variants of Covid in the world,  I think this is something we will have to get use to dealing with.    I remember getting my Yellow Fever Vaccine for my Dorado Trips to Bolivia.  Yellow Fever has a fatality rate of 8 percent but I was warned that people have been known to contract Yellow Fever from the Vaccine.    My Wife almost cancelled my trip.  Some things in life are worth the risks.   Covid  is becoming less and less fatal and I really believe that with as many people in the world that still have not been vaccinated  we are in for many more cycles of variants that are cooking in the infected populations of the world.   The US luckily is leading the way in immunity even though much of the population is vaccinated.   As of today, 48% of the population is vaccinated but 8.2 percent of the US population has recovered from covid  (29,222,972)   and there is an unknown amount of people who have recovered from asymptomatic infections.    Seventy percent  of the population might need to be immune before the coronavirus is effectively contained.   I think we are within a couple percentages of having herd immunity.

 

One thought on “The Wall, The Heat, and Being the FLY

  1. Fished the fore bay day before you. Had slow day. Found fish early that would not eat Had engine problem limited my ability to search. Ended up at the racks at about 11. Boated 6 in the big lake and 2 in the fore bay .cannot get anyone to look at boat until aug. 5th

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