No-Fly Fishing Isn't the Relaxing Side of Fishing

I caught 129 primarily long ear sunfish, but a couple bluegill and bass as well, in a little under four hours today. My dry fly fishing is where you'll find my fishing weakness.

I left three dries at the creek-and none of them were snagged underwater. I targeted larger fish including the biggest I've ever seen long ear-yes, it was still there-and a large bass sharing the same hole. No joy fooling either one of them. Though, I surprised myself by targeting several other larger long ear and a bluegill various places along the creek, and managed to extract them from a hyper crowd of pee wees.

The new 3 WT, a slight upgrade from my earlier ultra-light fly rods, is a delight. Smooth as butter. But the hotter it got-wait-it started hot though just after sunrise-and the more tired that I got, my "smooth as butter, 'A River Runs Through It' ", fishing became more like sour cream in a river that wanted to run from me. Worse, I knew I was getting lazy and really didn't try to fix it! Dry flies crashing to the water like miniature planes shot out of the sky. Collapsed leader from being too tired to wait one additional nano-second on a back cast to allow the line to straighten. Obviously at 129 fish, none of this a big deal for the number alone. The kids didn't seem to care how sloppy I became. But I'll swear I saw bigger fish roll their eyes at me, more than once.

Nonetheless, a fun time. These Palmer flies that I tie were on fire. I like Palmers. You can keep fishing them as a dry being sure to dry them with false casts each pursuit ,or rub some floatant into them, or you can do what I found very effective. Starting them as a dry and then making a couple twitches and pulling them just subsurface.

The mental steps involved keeping the whole especially dry fly fishing process "smooth as butter"...is exhausting. Or in my case today, knowing everything I was doing wrong by becoming lazy-and hot-and not correcting it, is exhausting. So the next time you see that pro fly fisherman and envy how relaxed they must be, think again.