News
It has been awhile since I updated the blog but with the snow, rain and cold, the fishing has been poor to say the least. Right now, the Lower Yuba is flowing over 8000cfs and the North Yuba is over 2700cfs. Neither one is conducive to fly fishing. At this point, I can’t even estimate when there will be fishable flows on either river and the main runoff hasn’t even started yet.
Bass fishing will be the center of attention for a while. Even though the weather has been cool and rainy, the lakes are warming up into the mid-fifties. The bass and bluegill are beginning to nest. We have been fishing some of the smaller farm ponds,se since they tend to warm up faster than the bigger lakes. Cooler weather, especially in the morning, has meant that nymph fishing early in the day has been more productive than going directly to floating bugs and poppers.
Largemouth on dragonfly nymph
This is the time of year that the damselflies and dragonflies are beginning to emerge so patterns that imitate these nymphs are very productive now. Remember to keep your retrieves slow, especially with the damselfly nymphs. Dragonfly nymphs, when they are not clambering around in the vegetation or along the bottom, swim with jet propulsion by expelling water from their anal cavity. By using a hand twist retrieve, with pops of your wrist, you can imitate this movement very easily. In most of the smaller ponds, you can use a floating weight forward line with a nine foot 3x leader. Full sinking lines and sink tips tend to get hung up on the bottom and in the vegetation making retrieves difficult.
As the day warms up and you can begin to hear the bluegill popping in the tules, it is time to go to floating bugs and poppers. My experience has been that the larger the bug the bigger the bass you will take. I tend to use foam bugs built along the lines of a Gurgler. They aren’t as pretty as hair bugs or commercial poppers, but they have have a couple of advantages. First, they are easy to tie and come out of the vise quicker. Secondly, they are soft like hair bugs and the bass tend to hold on to them longer giving you that extra fraction of a second to set the hook. Poppers tend to be hard and the bass reject them quickly. Sizes 2/0 to 4 seem to be the ticket for the larger fish.
If you want to catch bluegill, you will have to reduce the size of your bugs to #8-#14. I’ll continue with how to catch larger bluegill in another update.