10/9/2010 Salado Creek

Hello again. This morning I pretty much hit one of my normal fishing spots and got off to a crappy start. About a month ago my #3 weight rod broke and I put a new tiptop on it thinking I could fish it with a #4- I thought wrong. In my infinite wisdom, lol, I did not bother to cast it out in the yard first- so I had walked down to the creek to find out it was like casting with a broom stick. So I walked back to the car and got my other rod then fished a different part of the creek.

Starting out with a black wooly bugger I was getting few bites, same results with a brown bugger, then I changed to an olive one and the magic started happening. With the olive bugger I caught this nice Rio below on my second cast.

This spot below turned out to be a real honey hole, on my first cast to the shadow on the water further back I saw a nice bass mouth the fly but I didn't get him. Then on practically every cast I got bites, it seemed the Long Ear and greenies wouldn't let that bass have another shot at the fly even if it wanted to. I even caught another Rio in this section of the creek.



Upstream from this honey hole I saw several small bass but only this tiny one got hooked, hopefully I can catch him again when he grows up-to size. These spotted bass seem thrive in the creek and there are several approaching five pounds that I've seen in there but they are wary- guess that's how they got to grow that big. I started using 4lb tippets on this and my trip last week to see if maybe it would help me in getting the larger more wary bass to stike but the jury is still out on the results.
Moving further upstream I got another Rio on the line- they were onto to that olive bugger for sure.
I finished off using a streamer I tied the other day and caught the biggest Long Ear perch of the day, a nice fish.

Tomorrow I'm planning to hit Cibolo Creek with my dad once more, hopefully the fishing will be as good or better than I had today- I'm really hoping to catch a few Guadalupe bass or even just any bass.

10/2-3/2010

Once again this weekend I hit the Salado to fish a stretch of the creek I hadn't fished before. This area mostly has a limestone bottom with some gravel in a few areas with no water deeper than waist level. I started using a steamer I tied this week on a #6 hook but it was a bit big for the fish so I then put on a size 10 wooly bugger and then began hooking up with some perch and a few small spotted bass. I even caught a Warmouth perch, hadn't caught one in about 20 years so it was a bit of a trip. Unfortunately my camera battery was dead so I didn't get any pics, not to self: always have spare batteries for the camera.

My 7'6" rod was a bit longer than needed on this stretch of the creek and I wound up "choking up" on the rod to give me less rod length in some of my cast to avoid trees. This is prompting me to build up a 6' rod in the near future, I'm looking forward to working on that and may also build up a 6'6" fly/spin rod for my dad as a Christmas gift if I can pull it off in time.

Sunday I hit Blanco River State Park to try and catch some catfish along with my dad and a buddy I grew up with. The water looked great, it looked like a great place for catfish, but they apparently didn't think so- or at least they were not biting this morning. We tried chicken gizzards marinated with garlic, hot dogs, and shrimp to no avail. I managed to catch one perch fishing bottom and another on the fly rod, it was a beautiful day regardless of the fishing and a good time was had.