Weekend report (a bit tardy!)

I did fish this past weekend but I haven’t gotten around to posting about it until now. I had an acquaintance in town from the UK, actually a guy who I met through this blog so that’s pretty cool. We had been e-mailing back and forth for the past couple weeks in preparation for his trip here. He had a couple extra days before his conference and wanted to sample some of the fishing he’d read about on this blog. We were able to fish together Saturday morning at Wachusett and Sunday morning at the Swift River. I’ll simply write a quick post here because he has agreed to write a very interesting guest post regarding his experiences fishing here in Massachusetts for the first time! Keep your eyes peeled for his post to come out over the next few days to a week. It should prove to be quite interesting to hear what he has to say about the fisheries here in Massachusetts, especially considering he’s a very well-traveled fly angler and guide. Also, I anticipate that he will be including some incredible photography to go along with his post. Below is my brief report…

Wachusett: We had very good conditions for sight fishing Saturday morning, light winds, sunny. Of course those conditions aren’t great for shallow water bass fishing. We did end up spotting a number of bass, both smallmouth and largemouth but had some trouble getting the larger ones to commit to the fly. Still we had some decent action on smaller bass, bluegills, and rock bass. I was surprised to find a very good sized male largemouth in the process of clearing a nest? There were several males milling about while this guy was hard at work digging and clearing the nest out. In addition, there was massive female hanging off to the side just waiting to drop her eggs in the newly constructed nest. She was truly an impressive fish – without having her in my hands I would’ve guessed she was at least 6 pounds!

Swift River: My first time at the Swift was this past Sunday morning. We fished mostly at the Y-Pool. In short, I got rejected a lot… I ended up hooking and landing only one rainbow and hooking and losing two more nicer fish. It was pretty cool being able to see every fish in the river and picking out specific fish to cast to. It didn’t sound like anyone else was doing particularly well – talked to a few people and it seems the action was sporadic all morning and I kept hearing the fish were especially “fussy” that day. I did observe a number of fish lazily feeding on what I imagine where midge emergers as I couldn’t see anything more substantial flying around and that the fish that were feeding displayed the classic head-and-tail rise form that usually denotes keying on emergers.

I’m planning on getting out to the Cape again this weekend for stripers and bluefish if I can find them. However, I’m tempted to go west for trout but that might have to wait until next weekend. There’s just too much to choose from! Anyone else fishing this weekend?

 

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8 thoughts on “Weekend report (a bit tardy!)

  1. Glad you enjoyed Wach and the swift. The swift, is just about to hit my favorite… Hopper time :). People are working hard with #30's and 7x… And I'm tossing a #6 hopper or chernobyl and getting lots of rises and a number of fish. Dont get me wrong, fishing sub #22 flies on fine line is fun in it's own right… but some how, watching a fish swim 5 feet to eat something half the size of your pinky is just FUN!

    If you have a kayak, fish Washacum pond about 3 miles up the road from Wach in sterling. It's a fun bass pond. Doable… though tough to fly fish from shore, but if you have a yak or canoe it would be awesome.

  2. Adam, also, consider fishing the sulphur spinner fall. I did it once. It gets dark quick, but that's when the bugs fall and the fish are slashing the surface with wild abandon. I think fishing the Swift during the day is a low-probability option in most conditions. The fish have learned by now to hunker down mostly during the day and feed at night targeting minnows and the spinner falls that happen when the sun sets. Just my 2 cents.

  3. Love fishing the swift at dusk with large streamers. Smelt parterns always seam to produce, it might sound crazy but a tandem joe's smelt works great when the fish are short striking the fly.

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