There Should Be A Book Titled “Midge Madness”

/ Slate Run Sportsmen

This will be a short post folks!

It was a warm day in Slate Run. A little warmer than seasonable – mid to upper 70’s.

Mid to upper 70s (my screwy dial thermometer said 80!) Fall Day in Slate Run

I’ve been skunked the past two times out on Pine Creek and I was starting to think that I needed to go back to elementary school to learn how to fly fish.

It always bruises the ego a bit, when I don’t catch a fish and when I change flies at a rate that would impress the Indy 500 pit crews. I tried everything…. ok, maybe not EVERYTHING but, you get the idea. There was a light yellow colored mayfly that sporadically seemed to show up, caddis that would float upstream in the air – on occasion, and I’ll throw in that there were more than a few sizes of all mentioned here. I even tied on a trico thinking that if they were going for midges that THAT would be close enough to get a look. No such luck.

I did walk the coastline a bit and saw an interesting flower.

  • Is this a Hairy Sunflower?
  • Is this a Agapostemon Sweat Bee?
The pic on the right is inset from the one on the left. He’s there!

I am amazed that I’ve seen such a diversity of wildflowers this summer and fall. One can truly see a lot of beauty if you slow down a bit and just look at your surroundings.

  • Bumblebee Dinner
  • Last chance – what do you think?

Back to the task at hand – I tried everything (sort of) – a grey thing, a yeller thing, a Trico, an Ant, a Stimulator that didn’t stimulate so much as a look.

So I broke down and finally rigged up to fish a midge. I’ve been thinking and saying to myself, “must be midges”….. “must be midges” for SOME time during the last two adventures. Ok, I have a 5x tappered leader on and I had 6x tippet on the end of that. My 7x spool has been suspect of premature breakage and I wasn’t confident that if I went to 7x, that I’d keep any fish on for more than a milli-second.

But did I listen to reason? No! Of course not. I took a little more off the 5x leader and looped a 7x tippet onto the leader. Then, the midge.

Might look a little funky – I’m not giving up my fingerprints if I can hep it.

But, you get the idea of the scale – small… extremely small.

Result:

  • Same fish

Only one fish but it went for the fly that I tied on after two outtings of trying stuff that clearly didn’t interest the fish whatsoever (the chubs didn’t count)!

I’ll take it!

Till we see each other again… UB

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