Great end to a great year

I braved the insane wind today(15 gusting to 35) and fished with Shannon Drawe. We fished for carp at Ray Roberts first, which I already knew was inevitable. They were super spooky and the wind made spotting fish extremely hard but we still saw several fish (a lot for December is like 5 and we saw about 15) and I only made one cast all day and I spooked the only fish I casted to.

Then, we decided to hit the ray roberts dam to make the day worth it. We had an awesome day. We walked down and I rerigged, sticking a clouser on my TFO clouser, casted, and fish on!

I broke the fly off on a rock the next cast. Rerigging again with a clouser tied on a EC410 jig hook, making it more weedless (or rockless in this situation)

Back to fishing. Fish on!

They might be small, but they are sure fun to catch! I broke out my new 4wt. It's absolutely perfect in this situation.

Thanks to Shannon Drawe for taking all these pics! It's a change not being behind the camera. I still love the camera.

I decided it was time to change flies, giving Shannon a chance to jump into the action

You can see how hard sandbass are on flies here! This fly went though like 20 fish before it looked too torn up to continue fishing!

Shannon caught a few and I caught a few more. We moved back to the concrete walkway and fished around there for another 20 minutes before hitting the road again. I lost count at 60 sandbass, with 10 being keepers. A great end to 2010. Happy New year!

A day at the library

I decided it's been long enough since I pond fished. I braved the wind and beat the banks at the Coppell library yesterday. I got there and there were a bunch of conventional fisherman. They all said that the fish weren't biting and the wind was too high. I stuck on a little streamer with a tungsten bead, purple ice chenille, and a brown marabou tail and proceeded to catch 2 fish in 2 casts. the guys just looked at me like I was insane, whipping the fly rod around in 20mph winds. I worked my way around to my favorite culvert picking off a few bass here and there. I caught a few more in the culvert to end the day with 7. I successfully schooled 9 conventional fisherman with a fly rod and a teeny little purple streamer.

They were biting pretty good. I plan on going back soon to check it out again. I just hope there aren't so many people!

Rough Creek!

Rough Creek was awesome as always, but I had a great trip this time!

Caught at least 200 crappie, Mostly on Lake Fork Live Baby Shads on my hand poured heads.

Great hunt, even with it being in the 30s that morning, We shot 5 pheasant, 7 Chukars, and 39 Quail

Biggest bass of the trip was only 6lbs. I forgot to weigh it with the bait in the mouth so it was more like 7

Jonathan came on Friday- the best day by far. I got at least 30 crappie and a few bass. I caught on a Briminator and an Electric Blue North Fork Nymph

We got out on a boat about half through the day

We were about to go to the paluxy and then Dad suggested we go to another pond on the Rough Creek property. It was 100% worth it. First cast- 2lb crappie! topwater action on the Sage Largemouth! For Comparison- the handle of the largemouth is 7 inches. That's a 15.5 inch crappie!

Then another one right at 2.3!

Best we could have wished! I got 4 crappie all over 2lbs and 1 2lb bass.

Jonathan got a bunch too. I'll post a link to his blog entry whenever he posts it. all the better pics are on his camera.

Went back today, I got 2 bass. The biggest was a little under 3lbs

Had some visitors come over to see what I was catching.

The fly- a black and red Flaming Hooker 

Awesome landscape- Cactus and Prarie Grass