I got up this morning, and the first things that went through my mind were “I want an Iced Coffee from McDonalds and I want to fish”. So, I took up Dan’s advice and decided to head over to La Mirada to see if I could get a Catfish on the fly. The day started out great I caught a few Juvenile Largemouth, and hooked up with a Cat that went straight for a sunken cement block and broke me off so quick I had barely had it on the line. But on the very next cast I got the surprise of my life an Oscar!!! Now obviously someone felt this guy got a little too big for his aquarium and decided to dump him on the Park Lake down the street, but man was it fun to catch on a fly. This fish fought extremely hard for it’s size and there is nothing like adding a species to the lifelist. If that is not the most awesome thing that has ever happened to me, I caught another one just a couple of casts later. I think that after your blood pressure and heart rate go up that high you are supposed to have a doctor check you out, but we will see if there is any permanent damage!
Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I write a piece on patterns and consistency, I get thrown a curve ball and am forced back to my stand-by position that “nature writes the textbooks but doesn’t necessarily read them”.
Case in point: I recently wrote that much of what we do in fly-fishing is to look for identifiable patterns that we can imitate or exploit.
Well, as soon as that declaration was in print — stuff happened.
Not that I’m complaining. To the contrary, I ended up having a good morning… a really good morning. Sure, it included a breakfast burrito with a little crow in it, but it was still a good morning and besides, I was able to spit out most of the feathers before they caused any permanent damage.
You see, Mondays are generally our “office and errand” day. Normally, I’m up and immediately at the computer or fixing the stuff that needs fixing or out the door with “to-do” list, checkbook, dirty laundry, stack of mail and an enormous cup-of-coffee-to-make-it-all-possible in hand.
But this last Monday, thanks in part to the time change, I awoke with the first rays of the sun peeking over… well, the neighbor’s house — but you know what I mean. Anyway, I awoke to a beautiful, clear and sunny sky.
It was one of those mornings that seem to happen every morning in the movies unless it is a horror film, which I never watch anyway. It was simply too good of a morning to start off in front of the computer, no matter how fresh or tasty the coffee or how urgent the e-mail messages.
So I quickly readied up, kissed my still sleeping wife and headed off to La Mirada Park.
Sure enough, there were numerous early morning walkers, a knot of laughing, joking older gentlemen occupying a couple of shaded benches set back on a short rise, a couple of maintenance workers, but no fisher-folk.
I rigged up a new carp fly that I recently purchased from Mad River Outfitters and began some “research”.
Within five minutes, I was rewarded with a Largemouth Bass followed, in short order, by several more Bass. Sure, they were on the small size, but they beat out the boatload of waiting-to-be-opened spam e-mails from a whole crew of totally honest attorneys in Nigeria representing the multi-million dollar estates of recently and tragically deceased relatives I never knew I had.
I continued a slow, leisurely pace around the lake pulling in small Bass about every five minutes.
About half way around the lake, as I was stripping in the fly with short, fast pulls, my rod doubled over.
That doesn’t happen often enough, so it feels good just putting it in writing. In fact, I’ll write it again: My rod doubled over instead of the normal gentle twitching that indicates a Trout or Panfish or even the short Bass I was catching on the other end of the line.
My first thought was Carp. After all, I did have a carp fly on the end of my tippet and there are numerous large Carp in the lake but… something didn’t add up. There was no line-eating, blazing fast run, no wild thrashing, no splashing, just a hard, steady, consistent pull.
My next thought was turtle. I hate snagging turtles. We used to work at a vet hospital that was licensed to see wildlife and frequently an angler would bring in a turtle that he or she had snagged or hooked. It was always a huge pain to try and remove the hook or untangle the line from a ticked off, biting, peeing and snapping turtle. The soft-shelled turtles were the worse. They have these incredibly long necks, nasty beaks and even nastier dispositions that make handling them difficult at best and dangerous at worst.
So, I groaned and hoped that it wouldn’t be a turtle and I wouldn’t lose my new fly to some hissing, whizzing soft shell.
Still my rod stayed doubled over.
Whatever was at the other end was moving in a slow zig-zag pattern and it was getting tired. Since I only had a 7x tippet I wanted to be very careful. (I know, I know, I should have been using a 4x or so but I really had only intended to play with the carp fly before switching over to something smaller. It just started working so darn well.)
Anyway, I glanced at my watch and decided to time this little tug of war. At eight and half minutes, I finally saw the head of my opponent – a catfish! And a decent size one at that.
At twelve minutes plus change, I was able to land a ten and half inch cat AND get my fly back.
Needless to say, it has been a lot of fun telling some of my other fishin’ buddies that I landed a catfish on a fly. Most of these guys are the powerbait and mackerel strips type of catfish anglers so the looks on their faces have been priceless.
Of course, they instantly remind me that it is not the normal “pattern” for cats to hit flies.
To which I reply, “Good thing fish don’t follow web blogs, eh?”
I love this addiction called urban fly fishin’.
Autumn 2009 officially began in North America on September 22, 2009 at 5:18 pm EDT.
For much of the country, Autumn or Fall traditionally means a transition into cooler temperatures, changes in the foliage and shorter days.
In SoCal, we get the shorter days all right, but for us, the Fall is notorious for being incredibly hot, dry and windy. The seasonal Santa Ana winds blow in and the temps can easily soar into the triple digits while the humidity plummets in the opposite direction to the single digits.
No one really knows why they are called the Santa Ana Winds, though many explanations are put forth as fact. My favorite one is that the name harkens from the Spanish colonial days and is a corruption of the phrase for “Devil Winds”. Besides appealing to the romantic notion of a California long gone, that explanation is certainly an apt description, especially when an unanticipated hurricane-velocity gust drives a size 10 wooly bugger between your shoulder blades– though I have been known to call them something else during those moments.
At any rate, urban fishing in SoCal during the Santa Anas is always an adventure – Sure, fickle breezes befoul every other cast and cause flies to drop into places not aimed for, but in the same way that the hot, irritating winds stir up the darker passions of Angelenos, they also seem to induce a frenzied, maddened bite in local Bass and Panfish populations.
Sean and I both experienced this during the last bout of “Devil Winds”, when we each had opportunities to sneak off for a couple of hours to different local lakes.
I had a scorching good time, taking a dozen five to six-inch bass on a yellow egg imitation rigged as a dropper off of a grasshopper fly – all in about an hour. Sean, likewise, smoked ‘em at the lake he hit, pulling in another dozen Bass and Panfish on a similar rig, though the lake he hit was paradoxically shrouded in coastal fog.
What made these little ventures exciting was the fury with which these relatively small fish hit our flies. These fish charged and fought and shook their heads just like the big boys. I even had one shake out the hook only to have another one hit it before the ripples of the first fish had died down.
When we compared notes, Sean told of similar ferocity amongst the fish he encountered.
Chalk it up to the season or the winds, either way, we both had a devilishly good time pursuing this addiction called urban fly fishing.
“Those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happern. ”
Comments (2) 
It’s cross over time in urban SoCal.
