I live a bit outside Yellowstone National Park, within shouting distance of some of fly fishing’s most heralded rivers. I’m spoiled, and I enjoy the trout fishing as much as anyone, but every so often, I get this itch to chase something different. Trout are great, don’t get me wrong. They’re dependable in an offbeat way, more mercurial than my in-laws, and it’s hard to beat the feeling of seeing a good fish rise to your dry fly.
But the world isn’t just stretches of land and water between trout rivers. It’s full of other critters, many of which are great fun on a fly rod, as my recent trip to Florida taught me. In fact, I came back from Florida with so much affection for bass, that I couldn’t help poking around some of the ponds out in the valley, where the antelope and cattle compete for the same public grass.
Most of these ponds are small reservoirs built for watering stock and irrigating alfalfa fields, but word around town is that the Game & Fish department thought these ponds would be suitable for largemouth bass, bluegill, and tiger muskie. I don’t own a musky rod, but the bass and bluegill interested me plenty, especially with the boat hatch starting on the local tailwaters as word of decent trout fishing made it out of the valley.
So, last Sunday afternoon, I loaded up the truck and struck out for one pond that looked promising. A decade ago, biologists stocked it with 1,600 largemouth bass, then proceeded to dump bluegill and tiger muskie every other year afterwards. The entire western shore was all cattails and reeds, and there were enough spots along the dam with open casting room that I figured I could fish the pond well enough without a float tube.
I know next to nothing about fly fishing for bass, but I know the Clouser minnow is as good a streamer as any, so I tied that on the end of a short leader and started casting. A half-hour passed by before I felt that telltale thunk of a largemouth inhaling the fly. It wasn’t anything to write home about—11 or 12 inches long—but it was a largemouth bass I caught on a fly rod, without a friend there to hold my hand. That felt pretty good.
I missed another strike from what looked like a good-sized bluegill. Then my wife called and kindly asked me to come home; our 10-month-old daughter is cute and adorable, but she’s also a handful when you’re on your own, so I happily went home to play with her and help out around the house.
That lone bass didn’t quite scratch the itch, though. After getting the baby down for bed, I called Brett, a friend I used to work with when we both taught high school English. He has a canoe, he fly fishes, and he’s usually up for some exploring. We settled on taking his canoe out Tuesday morning, which I theorized would give us a good chance at fishing the wall of cattails on the west shore of the pond.
One nugget about bass I picked up from my friend Max in Florida is that they’re more active as the water gets warm, which is a paradigm shift for a lifetime trout angler. When Tuesday morning rolled around, and it was 10 degrees cooler than expected, I was worried the fishing wouldn’t pan out.
Brett and I earned an odd look from a farmer who drove by in a tractor on the county road as he moved from one field to another. I’m sure he’s used to people fishing the pond, but probably not hauling a canoe out there. It’s not very deep – maybe six feet at most – and especially out in the middle of fields and pastures, it’s not the sort of place where you see a lot of fly anglers, either.
We launched the canoe anyway, and focused on that wall of cattails. Brett caught the first fish, and that set off a flurry of activity for the better part of an hour as one bass after another—all small—ate our Clouser minnows with gusto.
The wind picked up and blew us out towards the middle of the lake. Just as I was about to start paddling us closer to the cattails, I saw a few branches poking out of the water. Another thing I picked up from Max is how much bass love structure; we spent hours casting to sunken trees at the bass lakes in Florida.
I paddled us towards those branches, which turned out to be the highest limbs of a pile of Christmas trees sunk in the middle of the lake, presumably for creating bass habitat. My first cast into the mess of branches yielded another cookie-cutter largemouth. Then, I threw an idle cast towards the far side of the tree pile. I let the fly sink, and was re-arranging my net beneath my feet when I felt a slight tap on the line.
I tightened the line, bounced the fly once, and felt another tap. I gave the fly a good strip-set, and my 6-weight doubled over. Whatever had just eaten it wasn’t the same 10-inch largemouth we’d been catching all morning.
Then the fish flashed a few feet under the boat, enough for Brett and I to realize this was a sizable bass. The fight was shorter and less dramatic than you’d expect, which Max later told me was due to the cold water, but I eventually put my personal-best largemouth in the net.
It’s no record-breaker, but it’s the biggest bass I’ve ever caught, and bigger by far than anything I ever thought I’d find in that pond.
I fished the rest of the morning in a daze before Brett had to leave, and once we’d loaded the canoe back up, I sent Max a few of the pictures. He couldn’t believe the size of the fish, or that I’d skipped out on the trout fishing to chase bass.
That big bass is a fish I won’t forget, in the same way the lunker from your local creek will always be burned into your memory. Sure, it’s a nice fish, and most anglers will gladly take the big bass over the small one, given a choice. But I think it’s the fish’s complete unexpectedness, combined with my still-new knowledge of largemouth, that still makes the catch seem unreal. Sort of like how the world seems so much bigger when you’re a kid, because you didn’t know any better.