Fish much?

To all my fishing buds throughout this great nation and to readers here at home, north of the border, and across the ocean - many of you will identify. And the rest of you, well, you know who you are...

I'm asked all the time - "How do you fish so much?" Usually the person asking has a sort of sulking demeanor with a hint of self pity about them as the words roll off their tongue. Maybe they don't even say it out loud, or in those exact words, but the message is conveyed loud and clear.

That's a puzzling question really. I didn't know that I did fish all that much. It doesn't feel like I do. I certainly don't go half as much as I want to. I can't imagine I've got rod in hand more than a typical fisherman who has their priorities in line.  I've got the usual constraints keeping me off the water - a family to raise, a day job, my wife's jam-packed calendar, hunting seasons, ice, etc.

I want to ask in return "why do you just WISH you fished this much?"

Do something about it.  Look for opportunity. Make it happen. Mark the full moons on the calendar. Make plans to leave early or to come home late. It doesn't have to be anything more than whatever is available. A bluegill caught by the fountain of a city park before starting the daily grind is time well spent.  Toss a trot line in the river and swing by to check it on the way home.

I truly don't fish much, at least not by my definition of "much." Perhaps more than the regular license holder, but certainly not nearly as much I'd like, or nearly as much as I could handle, or even as much as in my more care-free past. Some people think I live on the water. My wife is likely among them, although I suspect she's blotted the pre-kid days from her memory.  Fishing is like food - just grab a snack when you're hungry.  You gotta eat.  And eating always seems to happen.  Fishing can 'just happen' too.  People can't make it a week without a favorite TV show... yet complain from the couch that they don't get to fish often.

I've lived in lots of places across the country.  Fishing opportunities were different in every spot - but I capitalized on what there was to offer.  That much hasn't ever changed.  Those orchestrated opportunistic and somewhat random opportunities include trout and smallmouth in North Carolina, largemouth, white bass, and redfish in Texas, steelhead and salmon in Washington, trout and pike in Montana - plus a multitude of visited spots and vacations in between where fishing wasn't the purpose of the trip but got squeezed in - bass and snook in Florida, flounder in South Carolina, carp in flooded timber, trout at summer camp, bluegill anywhere, bowfin in coastal swamps, creek chubs in urban streams, brookies in Colorado, pickerel in a Piedmont creek, rainbows in South Dakota, white bass and buffalo in the Great Lakes, browns in Michigan, trout and bass in Georgia, browns in Wyoming, crappie in Pennsylvania... and so on.  I'm NOT talking about planned events penciled onto calendars that you look forward to for weeks on end.  Those trips exist too.  I'm talking solely  about the trips inserted into regular life.  Spontaneousness.  Or at least semi-spontaneousness. 

I do catch some pretty awesome fish.  The screensaver on my computer gets longer all the time. But the thing about it is, half of those fish were caught on opportunistic trips.  Planning may be involved, but I'm catching fish on hour-long deviations here and there.  Of course I find them on actual day-long or multiday fishing adventures, but all those "extra" stolen opportunities add up.  Give me six or eight quick trips during a prime month on prime water to one day-long trip anytime. One of those quick trips will line up with ideal conditions, and casts made will always be to the best spots. Trips once a month or a handful of times a year don't amount to much. Rarely do they fully overlap ideal conditions - clarity, weather, moon, hatches, etc. Don't tell me you've never checked in at the local bait or fly shop to jump start your 'trip of the year' and heard "Should have been here last week."  And if you're not keeping your finger on the pulse of what's going on with the waters you fish, then likely you'll spend a chunk of your once-in-a-blue-moon fishing trip figuring things out.  Not to mention you'll just be plain rusty.  Any skill takes practice.  Any workout requires reps for results. They say even a blind hog finds an acorn on occasion - but if that hog checks the same tree on a frequent basis he's going to find more than one.  He might even discover that little divet at the bottom of the hill where acorns seem to collect.

What am I saying? I'm saying Always travel with fishing gear. If fishing isn't your thing (which I have no idea why you'd be reading this if that's the case), then pack along the equipment needed to do whatever IS your "thing."  Hiking boots. A camera. Your bike. Heaven forbid a game boy.  If I were a golfer, I'd be driving balls off scenic overlooks. Perhaps your 'equipment' is simply a book. Readers seem to have this licked - they always produce a book out of nowhere and read it in any spare moment - in the bank drive-through line, waiting for kids, during lunch, on the can - you name it. They don't whine about not having time, they just plow through book after book as life goes on.

If you want to fish, pack your stuff. Always. View daily life as an opportunity yet to be discovered like the readers do. Pull over at bridge crossings. Don't have your gear? Shame on you. At least spend five minutes putting your polarized glasses (or squinty eyes) to work. You might see something useful for next time - actual observed water levels to compare to USGS flow graphs, crawdads on the bottom, a bunch of insect shucks, a weedline, rising trout, a hatch, a deep hole, a spray of fleeing baitfish, structure, a bass suck in a frog. There's just no telling.

You do have your gear, but no time? Cast anyway! Even if its just twice. See if you get a follow or a looker. What was it? Did you just learn something?
So many times I've done this in a fishery where I wasn't sure what it supported, or in a place where I wondered if maybe I was too far below a dam in a tailwater for trout to be there. Five minutes of ripping a plug or swinging a fly and I see a rainbow swipe and miss. Maybe a brown followed or I hooked a 6-inch smallmouth.  Time to head back to the truck and get on down the road, but I'm armed with info for a later trip. They're there!....

If you've got time at all, jet down a side road and look for an access point for future. Mentally map out some floats or hikes.  Better yet, scribble on a map, take gps points. Build a catalog of spots you can hit. Some you can hit more often than others. Some you simply need to pull off at routinely, like you do at your favorite gas station or coffee shop. 10 minutes under a bridge isn't going to kill anybody's schedule. Neither will 45 minutes most of the time. 

Ignore the weather, and by that I mean go no matter what. You can take those 10 minutes under a bridge in the freezing cold, or getting poured on, or getting pelted by mosquitoes. 

Fair weather fishing equates to barely ever fishing.

Its absolutely fine if none of this appeals to you. No sense in doing something you don't enjoy. But at the same time, don't whine about how you never get to go. Just enjoy when you do, or when you choose to. I've been called crazy a thousand times for what I'll endure and what I'll finagle to carve out some fishing time. But if that's not your style, then you can hardly complain that I fish more than you. The truth is, I do the same thing you do. I look around and see folks who appear to live on the water and have all the luck - sponsors, world travel, writing gigs, guiding connections, TV shows, blogs with actual reader traffic. 

And then I whine. Just like you.

When Opportunity Knocks

A theme of this blog has been one of making fishing trips happen.  Squeezing opportunities from situations as they present themselves - whether you're traveling or just happen to be carving out a spare moment for yourself on your local water.  This story is the essence of what I stress - seize the moments, fishing and otherwise.

A friend of mine was in town for National Guard duty this past weekend. He had an open window of time on Friday afternoon, so we laid plans to hit the river after work.  For me to clock an eight hour day I was sitting in my office chair already pecking away at the keyboard at 6am.  The weather was unseasonably warm, and had been all week.  The forecast remained stellar.  It was the kind of scenario that would have triggered my instinct to look for a way to get to the river, but events were already set in motion to head that direction, and they were coinciding uncannily with ideal February weather and decent water flows. 

There really wasn't time to do much.  The days are still short.  We couldn't float.  There wasn't time to hike in anywhere far.  We couldn't afford to burn the daylight on driving any great distance.  So I chose a spot I figured would be easy enough to get to while still putting us over some fish.  It's actually a really good hole, and one of the places I can get to the quickest from my house.  A go-to spot tailor-made for times like this.  We covered less than 100 yards of shoreline, spending the majority of the time we had just catching up and casting to a large run that was flowing strongly and impossible to reach all of.  We were launching jigs into the flow and letting the current freely carry them away as they gained both depth and distance, then slowly working them back - sometimes ticking bottom, but mostly just riding a very exaggerated swing while bouncing and popping, bringing the "baitfish" to life along a huge eddy.

It was on the beginning of one of these swings, after I had achieved the maximum amount of depth I was going to get on that drift, that my lure halted. I hadn't really started the retrieve, but I was pretty sure of what it was.  I gave a hopeful hookset  and was rewarded with heavy slow throbs in the deep bend of my 9.5-foot bronzeback.  The fish stayed deep, never making for the surface, and didn't show itself till it was nearly at the bank. Classic brown tactics, especially one with some heft.  And sure enough, a big beautiful brown came into our view as the fight began to enter the shallows.

We didn't measure it.  Both the scale and the tape were right there in my gear, but they never crossed my mind as I steered the fish into position for a lift and photo. The jig was lodged nicely along the outer edge of the hard mouth, and - just like a brown - line was wrapped around the head and snout a few times.  I snipped the line, popped the jig out, and let the line unwrap itself as the fish revived for a few seconds before shooting back out to the depths, skirting some ice chunks bobbing around in the shallows.

Just a week earlier I'd floated another friend in my boat who'd landed a 25-inch brown.  We'd measured that one. This fish was every bit of that length, but easily twice the girth.  And it wasn't the sort of fish who's belly sags over your fingers - it was a solid slab from head to tail.  It barely even seemed to taper to the tail, just abruptly ended in a muscular mass before the broad tail fanned out.

This fish was made for the moment, a result of seizing an opportunity. On a normal work day - one where no effort would be made to get outdoors - this fish wouldn't have been caught.  It wouldn't have even been casted to.  So many of my big fish have come in these stolen opportunities.  And better yet, it was shared with buddy I hadn't fished with in six months.  The trip was made to happen. It wasn't long.  It didn't involve a big undertaking.  A little planning and two hours of fishing time was extracted from an otherwise normal week - but with good weather and good company.  Neither of which would have been experienced without a little effort.  The picture would have been better with both of us in front of the camera....

Trips squeezed and shoe-horned into opportunistic time slots are a great escape.  They give a sense of accomplishment.  A sense of some adventure.  A sense of anticipation.  Something to look forward to.  A little spice to life.  Often some good camaraderie. They can steer the mood of an entire day or even a whole week.
And - they also seem to result in more than their fair share of larger fish, at least in my experience.  This day fit that exactly.  Three fish were landed - two smaller rainbows and the big brown.  I think there are lots of factors at play, things that just might make these little trips a bit of a stacked deck.  I suspect its some combination of elements like picking a very specific spot,  tying on a proven bait and using a proven presentation, eager anticipation leading to confidence in the moment, intentionally looking for prime weather and water conditions, hitting the golden hours of daylight, etc. But also, simply because you went.  A string of one or two hour trips adds up, and before long you've been on the water in more conditions and during more prime-time hours than any one-day trip pinned on the calendar long in advance could provide.  In short, go! - whenever opportunity knocks.