Monday Morning Sidewalk Cold as Ice
Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.
We are in the midst of our first winter in years here in North Texas, and although it lacks historic amounts of precipitation (although it’s sleeting at the moment), it is definitely cold enough to get locals to think twice about wetting a fly line. The reality is; the worse the weather, the better the fishing for stocked fish in North Texas and Southern Oklahoma.
TPWD has been dumping their stock of synthetic fish in Texas ponds, and streams for awhile now, and places like Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area have received a fair share of the synthetic population thus far. However, just because they are stocked at LLELA doesn’t mean they are still there. Low flows, warm temperatures, predation and conventional fishers who know what this does to a synthetic fish population – concentrates them in only a few areas – have probably reduced the stocking by 80-percent. Run the numbers, and you are looking at less than 600 synthetics remaining. IF YOU are interested in fly fishing LLELA for rainbow trout, remember that they will bite better the worse the weather, and your best bet would probably be to dead drift a woolly bugger dow the front of pool drop-offs (tungsten – let it sink and hang). These are fish you would seriously want to KEEP so as to put them out of their misery as the water warms up, and pollution sets in. They aren’t going to grow up to be big wild trout – trust me on that one. TPWD trout stocking is a fantastic opportunity to get kids out and fishing, but we know they need to CATCH, so conventional fishing methods will produce your best results most of the places TPWD stocks trout in Texas.
I’ve been burning the midnight oil trying to find a good theme for Texas Fly Caster, but so far all of them have drawbacks that are greater than the progress we would see. And you thought fly fishing was tough!
I hope you are where you want to be this morning – be it your fly shop, your tying bench, your cubicle or your warm home – looking for some pearls of wisdom (keep searching), or simply lurking in the shadows of the web.
One old video has fallen through the internet cracks, and it’s an early interview with Barry Schrader on the Blue River in Oklahoma. Posting it here will bring it out of the moth balls – at least temporarily. Reviving these is like cracking open an old box in the attic and finding something worthy.
Look for another post later today about the Blue River.
Category: Culture on the Skids
