Well, it was a brutal wait but yesterday the Potomac shad kicked in. I started early but shouldn't have as the bite really got going mid to late morning. At the south end of the island near the boat docs a guy was tossing shad darts from shore and was well into fish. Every other cast kind of thing. Upstream of him for a while was a single handed fly guy roll casting a sink tip and also getting into fish. Clearly they were up against the shore. Eventually I set up shop at the northern tip of the island - next to the informal, but stable wood pile bridge - and cranked up my light 2-hander (12'6" 6 weight tossing a 475 grain skagit with 15' of T-11) and it was game on. Sometimes mid-swing, sometimes on the hang done, with a strip or without a strip my chartreuse bug with great big lead eyes was getting clobbered. A guy in a canoe set up just upstream of me and did great on a full sink line. Upstream on the shore it was combat fishing with darts and flies with doubles happening every once in a while. For this inshore fishing the fly didn't have to be too deep - maybe 3-4 feet down, and they just loved a classic steelhead swing starting the strips at mid swing. We are lucky to have such a great fishery.
And thanks to the volunteers that were having a clean the river day.
River was high and a bit muddy, but the pods of fish kept moving thru and were very grabby.
A lot of the H Shad were very large and I swore I had a few A shad in there based on size and markings. These were 4+ pound fish!
Also, it was clear that there are plenty of large stripers present. I saw some massive splashes up and down the river out in mid current and closer to the VA side. Perhaps I'll take a stouter rod to that side of the river to see what I can swing up with a large profile fly.....
I suspect that the big surface splashes are from stripers chasing herring from near the bottom clear to the top, so a deep water presentation is likely the way to go despite the surface activity.
Gerry
--
http://www.tpfr.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Tidal Potomac Fly Rodders" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tidal-potomac-fly-rodders+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tidal-potomac-fly-rodders@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tidal-potomac-fly-rodders/9766b5ce-d52d-4740-8f5c-036a5f3ee3ae%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment