The canal is rewatered!

My friend has reported that there is water back in the Canal in the Georgetown stretch along with sightings of carp. Maybe the mulberry season isn't over yet after all! The trees likely won't be dropping for too long, but the good thing is that the draining and refilling likely brought in a new batch of carp which means they haven't learned all our flies yet!

Memorial Day Mulberries

I meant to post this earlier, but life got in the way. Better late than never.

The mulberry hatch is in full swing. I got out all three days over Memorial Day weekend. The fish seemed to get more aggressive as the weekend rolled on. My last fish of the weekend was the biggest, pushing 15 lbs. and caught right in front of the Sea Catch restaurant. It put up one heck of a fight, and I had quite the crowd cheering me on by the end.

The big boy

Even the turtles are looking for the berries

Mulberry Watch, Part 2

I got out this past Saturday in the few hours to fish the stretch between Fletchers and Georgetown again. Some of the mulberry fruits are beginning to show light shades of red, but we still have some time to go. Strangely, or maybe not, some of the trees were a little deeper red than the picture, but others weren't even showing any red at all. With warmer weather coming up, we might see the fruit starting to drop next weekend, but certainly by Memorial Day at the latest. The other cue is there's lots of baby geese around now. They're cute, but their parents get a bit angry when you walk past.

Now as far as the fishing. There was some good and some bad.

The Good

• Very clear water - at least for the canal - with about 3 feet of visibility
• Very active fish - lots of fish were poking around, feeding, and cruising
• Very big fish - I'm fairly certain one fish (that wouldn't eat) was easily pushing 30 pounds

The Bad

• The water was extremely high - about 2 or 3 feet above normal. It was actually spilling over the overflow point that's a bit north of Key Bridge.
• A storm rolled in and ruined everything

I was quite surprised when I got to the canal and saw how much water was there. I wasn't sure if it would mean a ruined day or a good day. Turned out to be a little bit of both. It was very easy to find cruising fish. The bad thing was feeding fish were extremely hard to target. It was easy to spot the large plumes of silt, but because the water was so high, the feeding was happening too deep to actually see far enough through the silt to figure out where the fish were. To make it even worse, the silt clouds simply were not dispersing. 

Nonetheless, I still managed to stick two fish, Unfortunately, one escaped my net on my first landing attempt then popped the hook out, and the second fish broke me off while I was trying to scoop him. I pulled the hook out of countless other fish's mouths too.

I went with the Bonefish Gotcha again today after having success last week. I can't quite figure out this fly. Some feeding fish would ignore it, others would attack it very aggressively. I even got a few fish to eat that I never would have expected to pay attention to food with my old techniques. I also have a zero percent success rate in setting the hook if the fish is swimming towards me with this fly. That's the hardest way to set a hook on a carp, but I'd usually at least make contact on a few fish. Maybe it's just a coincidence. 

Keep your eyes out for the next report. I'm going to try to get a mulberry fly tying tutorial up soon too!

Carps Revenge

I found a couple spare hours Saturday afternoon to get back out to the canal to get one last shot at the mulberry hatch and to hopefully enact my revenge upon the fish that broke me off. The season is really done now. I only saw about four fish in the 2.5 hours I got on the water. I broke two of them off. Ugh.

Mulberry Hatch

I fished the mulberry hatch with my friend Aaron yesterday on the C&O Canal right in Georgetown. It was my first time ever fishing that stretch of the canal, and the first time ever fishing the mulberries. What an experience! Of course, the fish weren't in thick under most of the trees, despite a steady drop of berries, but I still managed some success anyway. The total to the net in a half day was 3. I broke off one big boy that would have been a great fish. Aaron also broke off a fish after he set the hook so hard, I thought he was going to backcast it into the trees behind us.

The story of the day, though, was my last fish. I found a section where I saw a bunch of big fish feeding. I was fishing near the south side of the old boat (the "barge" which was tugged by donkeys in the old days) in the end of the canal, and didn't have a good game plan for landing a fish. I was about 12 feet off the water, with a narrow stretch of about 5 feet of water between me and the boat. I literally have no idea how I landed this fish, because nearly everything possible went wrong, but I still managed to get it to the net. Once I hooked it, it went on a hell of a run and of course made a sharp left around some bridge pilings. He had no thoughts about slowing down, and I started seeing my fly line getting low. I contemplated for a minute breaking him off on purpose because I was afraid he'd sever my backing and I'd lose the whole line, but I decided to press on and hope it held. I saw almost 100 feet of backing out of the rod tip before I stopped the fish, and luckily the backing held against the bridge. Just as luckily, the fish decided to come back around the correct side of the pilings to not completely wrap me up. But it wasn't over yet. Once I cleared him of the boat, the fish decided to swim around the other side of the boat, promptly getting the leader stuck on the boat itself. At that point, I had to do some passing the rod to myself around some trees, climb up on the bridge and walk across, and somehow popped the line free. At this point, there's a good 25 people watching this spectacle. Finally, the fish was getting tired, so I walked him down to the end of the lock where there was only a foot or two to reach into the water and was able to scoop him up to the cheers of the crowd. I felt the leader, and it felt like I was running my hand over sandpaper. I still have no idea how it held up.

Sucking a mulberry off the surface

This turtle was waiting for his chance too

So close to an eat... but he refused