My First Post

         Welcome to my new blog! I have never done this before, so it might be spotty at first but I will do my best!

         My First post will be about my most recent fishing adventure

        I started off the day driving off to the tubes below Tuttle Creek. The problem was that the Army Corps of Engineers had closed the tubes until they were barely open. The thing about the tubes is that when they are open, they pump out water at very high speeds which causes the water downstream to become very turbulent. When this happens, smaller fish like gizzard shad and baby drum cannot keep up, and they make easy pickings for the predators like white bass and flathead catfish. But when the tubes are closed, the water calms down and becomes a much worse place to fish. The tubes are on the blue river, which means that they control how powerfully the water downstream flows. Rocky Ford is a fishing area south and downstream of the tubes, and when the tubes are down the water at Rocky Ford becomes more accessible. So I decided to go to Rocky Ford instead.

         When I first got there, it was just as I expected. The water which was previously very high was now only filling in the main stream. I noticed that there were several puddles left over, so I checked them out and found a bunch of baby catfish. I decided to help them out by moving them back into the river. The day started out slowly, at Rocky Ford there are many shallow rapids followed by deep pools, so the best technique is to check them all out. I kept snagging suckers that were hanging out in the pools but they kept getting off. The first fish I caught was a little wiper (hybrid white bass x striped bass) that was about ten inches long. I continued fishing and caught a largemouth bass. This is rare because largemouth bass prefer still water, yet I caught it in the rapids. I moved upstream and found many wiper and white bass chasing after bait fish and leaping out of the water. For some reason these fish were completely disinterested in my lure and I only managed to catch one small fish after twenty minutes of effort. I then moved back downstream and caught a beautiful 18 inch saugeye (hybrid walleye x sauger).                













Pictures showing the saugeye and a closeup picture showing the sharp teeth.


          I fished for quite some time and had no luck, so I decided to use a very expensive lure that resembled a bleeding fish. After a short time I snagged it on a rock that I could not see. I decided to pull on the line bare handed to try to pull it free, but the rock decided to pull back. I knew I was onto something huge but the fish wrapped itself around a rock and with one jerk of its head it snapped my line. I decided to move upstream to find a better place to fish but just as I was leaving, a guy told me that he was doing very well with poppers. (Poppers are lures that float and make a loud pop on the surface of the water when you jerk your rod back.) With this new information in the back of my mind I went upstream and started fishing. after not too long, I snagged another sucker, but this time I managed to catch it. It measured 26 inches.

This type of fish is a blue sucker, it has a small, downward facing mouth that helps it sift through silt and mud to find food.


             It was at this time that I decided to try using a popper. It only took two casts when suddenly WHAM I had a beautiful and hard fighting white bass on the end of my line. I moved back downstream a little and hooked another fish on the popper, but it got itself wrapped around a rock and I need to walk out into the rapids to untangle it. I kept fishing in the same area but I switched to a lipless crankbait. (this is a lure that has a lot of beads in it which cause it to rattle when it is drawn in.) It seems that the switch was a good Idea because it wasn't long before I caught another saugeye. In the area that I was in there were a lot of lines that people had cut because they snagged their hooks on rocks. The problem is that the lines get tangled up with your lures meaning that you can lose your lure if you can't reach it by hand. It would be much better if people would pull on their lines when they get caught on a rock, because pulling on the line causes it to snap at the point of greatest weakness, which is where the knot on the hook was tied. Anyway, I moved downstream with the popper and fished it until it started to get really dark. As I was watching my lure spit and sputter across the water there was a huge crash and a wall of water enveloped my lure, I instantly knew what hit it as I set the hook - a giant wiper. The fish was just as spectacular as I imagined, unfortunately I was unable to get a picture before it kicked out of my grasp and back into the water. I estimate it to have been about sixteen inches long, which is a good size for a wiper.


      The rest of the trip was uneventful, as I caught nothing more. But I will always remember that fish that stole my lure, along with the one that demolished my popper.

       so until next time, this is Ben Warren signing out