Underway

I dug through some boxes this afternoon and located all of my fly fishing equipment. That comes under the heading of "unpacking" so it was all good. It's just a coincidence that it means I can now actually go fishing with it.

It was a little poignant to clean off the fly patch on my vest. There before me was the record in flies of my 2016 Washington fishing season. When I finished removing all the flies I was left with the proverbial clean slate. Time to begin fly fishing in Indiana again.

Why not sooner than later? I slipped away after supper and headed to the nearby lake to stretch my casting muscles.

I began on the dock. It felt good to cast again. I had a 5X tippet on, and fished a few different small flies, from mayflies to griffith's gnats. I knew there were fish under the dock, but I was still convinced there could be bigger bluegill and maybe crappie, and maybe even bass, out in open water.

Dead drift, twitching, a slow strip, and even drowning the flies and stripping them in, brought no evidence of fish life. I tried a small muddler greased to float and again moved nothing. I wasn't so convinced anymore.

I crossed the causeway and cast the muddler out past the weed beds in the main lake. (My backcast was tailing out over the road behind me, so I had to watch for passing cars and bicycles. One cyclist hit his brakes hard enough to squeal the tires, but I would have missed him by a mile.)

The muddler got immediate attention, but it seemed that the fish hitting it were too small to get a grip on it. I tied on a little light caddis and caught the first fish in Indiana. Why not a bluegill for the first fish? You can bet it won't be the last bluegill.

With the coming of dusk the lake lit up. Fish were active all along the shoreline and in the weed beds. Some, I surmised, must be bass. I switched to a muddler and worked it. No bass this time, but one very feisty pumpkinseed managed to get its mouth around that big fly.

So the fly gear is out and organized, and the rod and my casting arm are limbered up. My 2016 Indiana fishing season is underway.