Amazing beauty is there for the taking - if only you’ll spend the time to find it and protect it. This photograph was taken just 30 miles from downtown Cincinnati on a creek few folks fish!
"Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.” --Don Marquis
My earliest memories of fishing are with my grandfather, Joseph Henry Wager. I was, perhaps, three years old when Gramps took me to Massachusetts’ Duxbury Bay Bridge to fish for tautog, flounder and whatever else may have grabbed our sea worm baits. I clearly remember placing the butt of the big spinning rod on the wood planked walkway of the bridge and finding that the oversized spinning reel reached better than waist high. I dreamt of the day when I would be able to handle the rod with the ease and familiarity my grandfather exhibited.
When I was eight or nine my neighbor and then-fishing partner, Pete Bumpus, knocked breathlessly at our back door to show me something he had learned from Gaddabout Gaddis’ The Flying Fisherman TV show. It was called fly tying, and from that point on we spent countless hours binding the feathers from various feather-dusters to large hooks, fantasizing about enticing pickerel and bass to our feathered frauds. Never mind the fact that neither of us owned, nor had even seen, a fly rod! This was the “real” fishing that experts on television demonstrated. Deep down inside I already knew that these first tentative steps would irrevocably lead to the all-consuming passion that fly fishing has become in my life today. By age twelve I had built my first fly rod, joined Trout Unlimited, and started exploring the world of both freshwater and saltwater fly fishing in depth.
Fast forward to 1984 and my life’s journey brings me to Cincinnati, Ohio. I had nearly twenty years of fishing experience under my belt. I had fished striped bass in the surf of Cape Cod, salters (sea-run brown trout) in the creeks of Plymouth, and Coho salmon off Point Defiance in Washington’s Puget Sound. I had taken largemouth bass, some of respectable size, from the slow running Taunton and Town Rivers of Massachusetts’s south shore. I had tangled with smallmouth bass from the deep, rocky lakes of southern New Hampshire. I had chased cod and mackerel off the Dennis Ledge, trout on the Swift River, and bluefish near Stony Castle in Buzzard’s Bay. Still, nothing I had seen or experienced prepared me for the waters of southwest Ohio. With its rocky, silt-laden rivers, shallow and green with algae, this didn’t look like a promising place to ply piscatorial passion.
The first few fishermen I met on the banks of the Great Miami River used such unsavory baits as hotdogs and chicken livers. The local fly shops advocated trips to Michigan for salmon and steelhead, but were strangely mute about local opportunity. My sky had become dark, indeed. For nearly two years I avoided fishing my local waters out of ignorance and prejudice.
Two decades later I sit in my office surrounded with the mementos of half-a-life spent fishing (my wife would say “misspent”). Many of my most memorable moments have come from the very streams and rivers that so perplexed and disappointed me when I first moved to the heartland. Smallmouth bass, a denizen I had pursued with some regularity on the sandy-shored Peter’s Pond of Cape Cod, abound in the creeks and rivers of southwest Ohio. This feisty gamester has become the very center of my fishing universe. The bronze predator is not alone, however. I have come to find that the waters of the Great Miami River basin, indeed almost all Midwestern warm water flows, harbor many game species worthy of the attention of the committed angler. While it is not the fishing Mecca one thinks of in the same way as icons like Montana, Minnesota or Michigan, I have found southwest Ohio home to fine sport. The heartland needs to make neither excuse nor apology.
Local waters – home waters – are a great blessing. This realization sparked my desire to write this book. The annals of angling bring plenty of notoriety and attention to the “great” waters. Millions of dollars are spent traveling to, fishing on, and managing the destination locations pictured in all the glossy magazines. Few of us are fortunate enough to live near quality cold-water habitat. Fewer still can claim convenience to a fabled fishery in which to dabble. Most of us, however, have easy access to the hundreds of thousands of miles of fishable warm water flows – a suburban fishery for the twenty-first century anger!
For me the question became “where do I fish for a few hours after work?” I’ve found these warm water flows were my answer, and it’s brought more joy to my life than I could have predicted. If I succeed in motivating you, dear reader, into exploring warm water opportunities in your back yard and experiencing the excitement that can be found there, then I’ll consider this effort a success. To that end I will focus this work on the tools, tactics and species with which you should be familiar.
This book will not discuss the basics of fly casting, knot tying and fly fishing components beyond that which is of special significance as it relates to fly fishing in warm water flows. There are scores of texts, written by true experts, which treat those subjects in greater depth, with more detail and with a better level of explanation than I would attempt here. Name brands, where mentioned, reflect my personal experience and should not be taken as an endorsement over products with which I have no hands-on time. Nor should this text be considered the final word in the biology, ecology or technology used to fish temperate flows with a fly. I am merely an enthusiastic angler trying his best to share the insight, observations and joys of time spent fishing local waters.
I do hope to educate the reader in one important facet of fishing; the potential quality, importance, and sense of intimate familiarity which can be earned on local waters – wherever they may be. The grass is not always greener in the next pasture over. A fishing partner once commented that fishing here (Ohio) couldn’t hold a candle to the quality of fishing he had experienced in Canada. This may be true. What is also true however, is that he, like I, had not often (ever?) taken a week or so of prime season and fished eight, ten or twelve hours in a day with the same intensity one would spend fishing a ‘destination location’. There are plenty of fishless days to be had in Canada, just as there are plenty to be had in Ohio’s Miami River Valley. There are plenty of memorable days available in each, as well. Always bear in mind that to enjoy great fishing you have to be on the water!
When one develops a love for a sport such as fly fishing, the motivation to protect the stage where the sport is played out becomes heightened. I would be hard pressed to point out waters more in need of stewardship than the warm flowing waters of the Midwest. Plagued by the on-going disaster of non-point source run-off, agribusiness-gone-wild, and threatened by the phenomenon of “urban sprawl”, our neighborhood waterways are in dire straights. Siltation, pollution and habitat destruction have leveled once pristine river systems, pushing out valuable native species and opening the door to destructive exotic invaders. Perhaps without knowing it, bait fishermen who empty their bait buckets at the end of the day have done much to damage the fishery. From goldfish to carp, zebra mussels to gobies, our native sport fish, which have evolved and lived in these waters since before the last ice age, are under increasing attack. If any of the Midwest’s original beauty is to be left for the enjoyment of our children and grand children, we must – as a community of sportsmen – become motivated to act.
Protecting the native warm water fisheries of the Midwest is no small undertaking. The cold-water fisheries have well-deserved publicity and well-funded (well, marginally at least) and organized groups to function as the “soldiers of the salmonids.” The plight of wild bass on small regional flows is more likely to be influenced by the pressure of the developer’s dollar than the conservationist’s cry for sanity. Chief among threats are poor farming practices, which remove vital greenbelts and allow planting of crops right to the edge of flowing water. The erosion of stream banks is a quick response to this practice, increasing watershed siltation and allowing unchecked run-off of chemicals and fertilizers that quickly poison these delicate waters. This one-two punch is more than nature can stand, and the ecosystem quickly collapses.
Draconian riparian law also threatens the sport, both for us and for our children. Streams and rivers are not “possessions” that can be owned by individuals. Flowing water is the very life’s blood of our nation. It is through adequate access that riverine systems can be monitored, cultivated and protected. A popular animated children’s movie reminds us “all drains lead to the sea.” It is important to remember that they must pass through our streams and rivers on that journey. Those same streams and rivers are the visible manifestation of the aquifers, which provide us with the water we drink. Streams and rivers are no more a piece of “property” than the air we breathe. Moving water is a public treasure, a national resource, and a living reflection of the ethos of our culture.
You are reading this, so I can safely assume that you wish to broaden the palette of your fishing opportunity. As a sport, this activity must be important to you. Allow it to be important to your children and your children’s children. Get involved locally with the organizations that are doing the hard work of monitoring our riverine environments, clearing them of the detritus of too many years of neglect, and educating the non-fishing public about the importance of maintaining a clean flow of healthy water. Everywhere we look we see the interconnectedness of life with moving water. Complete your connection and help make a lasting difference.
There is a fundamental, even profound, difference between a trout stream and a bass stream. The difference extends well beyond temperature. With increased average water temperatures, decreased gradient, and an attendant super-abundance of nutrients, comes a bloom of biodiversity almost beyond the imagination.
Many of the macroinvertibrates found in trout streams are also found in temperate flows. Added to this biomass, however, are scores of temperature sensitive aquatic insects, decapods, oligacheates, amphibians, reptiles and fishes that cannot survive in the colder, more sterile environment of the trout stream. In its environment, the trout fills the ecological niches that are shared amongst bass, pike, panfish, carp, sucker and dozens more.
Warm water rivers share their abundance among a laundry list of species that literally dwarfs the biological inventory of the cold-water environment! With the warm water system’s increase in biodiversity comes an increase in competition for limited resources. In true Darwinian fashion, increased competition leads to increased specialization. This is both a blessing and a boon to the avid angler. In order to become a better warm water fly fisher it is important to understand both predator and prey. That being said, we take the first step…
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