Fishing lakes and ponds

0:00This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast we'll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and Tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing Tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It's only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos because of your support. So we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA rods, lines, and flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about the simple method of fly fishing. Hey everyone, today is December 17th, 2015, and I'm recording the 25th episode of the Tenkara Cast. We've been very consistent at releasing one episode every week, in a couple of cases more than one episode actually in a week. just early on. And part of that is because we really want to make sure that we can educate you on as many aspects of Tenkara as we can. And, you know, it's been really fun to kind of put these together, kind of have a theme, have a topic and covering those topics. Usually you've noticed it's kind of me rambling and the idea, the vision that I've had for this podcast is to kind of bring more people in, make it a little bit more story focused.

1:31You know, we're having different people's participation in podcasts. But for the first several episodes, I wanted to, you know, I did that a few times in a couple of interviews, but for the most part, I wanted to get some topics covered. And that's also part of the reason I did not number the episodes like a lot of podcasts do because it's not really very relevant what episode number it is. Most of the first episodes have been just kind of foundational pieces and the titles reflect that. Today I'm going to be talking about fishing in still water, fishing in lakes. And from now on, like we're getting into the holidays here, I'm going to be doing this as a bi-weekly. So every two weeks I'm going to be releasing a new episode as opposed to every week. That will give me a little bit more time to work on some episodes, kind of getting a little bit more, you know, a few people kind of participating, getting a little bit more of the stuff that I wanted to do. Plus, we're going to have a couple of trade shows ahead of us, and I have a fair amount of traveling to do. So, you know, I don't want to over promise here. I don't want to promise one every week like I have been doing. And I'm going to switch the podcast to a biweekly thing. Hopefully that's okay with you. Hopefully you won't miss us too much. If you do, let me know. If you really kind of need that episode every week, just drop me a line. But you know, since you're listening to this podcast, and you might be kind of missing having one every week, I'd highly recommend looking up a couple of other podcasts that I personally enjoy listening to. There is April Vokey's Anchored. She's got a good podcast with some terrific interviews. Of course, Tom Rosenbauer from Orvis has a very consistent podcast, very well done. I have been honored to be part of the podcast a couple of different times and highly recommend you subscribe to the Orvis podcast with Tom Rosenbauer.

3:45Another one that I listen to is Rob Snow White, the fly fishing consultant. I think that's a good one. And one of the other ones that are not really fishing related, but I really enjoy listening to because it's the kind of storytelling that I aspire to do is, what is the name? Never mind it. Maybe I'll, oh, the Dirtbag Diaries. Sorry, just had a little bit of a brain fart here. But the Dirtbag Diaries is a fun podcast with different stories about the outdoors. A lot of it is climbing related. But yeah, listen to Tom Rosenbauer's, April Vokey's, and Rob Snow White's podcasts when you're missing the Tenkara Cast. In any case, without further ado, let me get into the topic of the day. I'm not going to talk forever. This is like most of the episodes that I've done so far. It's a little bit of a foundational basics kind of piece.

4:47and you know I do intend to build on these a little bit more as we go on with more specific techniques or things that I probably forgot to make mention of and there's been a few of those already and like you know I was listening to the episode on weighting safety which I released last week and I realized it's like duh you know I didn't even talk about the a couple of the risks that people have. For example, you know, and a couple of things that, you know, I do like to carry with me while wading. For example, I neglected to mention that one of the real risks that we face in wading in certain rivers is getting our feet stuck between rocks. You know, a rock might roll over your foot and you get stuck. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, I was fishing one of the streams outside of Salt Lake City in Utah and the day after I was fishing by myself and the day after or two days later there was a newspaper headline about somebody who was fishing the very same stream probably just another mile or two upstream and his foot got stuck in between rocks he was not particularly close to any you know campsites or anything like that and he was stuck overnight.

6:07The water was actually pretty cold. I had been fishing and I would have to get out of the water because it was cold in the evening. And he stayed there overnight. The next day he was yelling, somebody kind of overheard him. But one of the things that I've taken from that experience of, you know, I couldn't be myself completely being in that situation, just carrying a whistle, you know, that's one of the things. Because in the article, the newspaper article talked about how he couldn't really be heard. You know, it's really hard to yell any louder than a stream, for example. So, you know, on the waiting safety episode, I should have talked about that experience as well. And carrying a whistle is always a good idea. And there's a bunch of little things I've been taking notes, you know, of things that I wish I had talked about in previous episodes. In any case, when it comes to lakes, I'll talk a little bit about how I fish lakes, my approaches. and I'm sure later on, you know, based on your commentary as well as things that I realized I missed, I will be talking about fishing still water again.

7:11I am not a huge lake fisherman. I do love fishing streams and rivers primarily, so I'll get that out there, but I do fish lakes as well. I fish lakes and ponds on a somewhat regular basis, primarily when springtime comes. here in Colorado because we have a big runoff season. The rivers swell up and get too full, and that makes fishing pretty difficult. We can fish here year-round, but a lot of the streams and rivers here get blown out through the spring, depending on how our snowpack is. And to get my fishing fix, I'll go fishing lakes. But even throughout the year, you know, sometimes I want to take a friend out for a quick outing. Sometimes even just my wife and I want to go for a little hike or a little walk near home. And, you know, we just might take a poll and fish one of the ponds. We have a few ponds close to our home. There's two that are actually pretty much walking distance from our house. And we, you know, we'll fish those for bluegill bass. Actually, we don't really have bluegill, but we have crappie and we have sunfish and bass in those lakes. And Occasionally we'll see the carp as well in those, although I haven't caught the carp in those lakes.

8:34In any case, and also the other experience that I do have with fishing lakes on a somewhat regular basis are alpine lakes. If we are going on a hike in alpine country like Rocky Mountain National Park, usually I like to follow streams. and I always tend to prefer fishing streams, but sometimes it's nice just to hike up to a lake and have a ride along and I'll definitely fish, especially when I see fish, I get excited and I'll fish. You know, so my forte and my strong kind of experience is primarily rivers and streams. That's probably, you know, why I've been attracted to Tenkara to begin with, because there's no other tool in my experience to fish a stream like a tenkara rod. But lakes, you know, a tenkara rod, line of fly, works perfectly well in lakes as well. So the first thing I want to talk about is just the approach to lakes. You know, there's several different ways we can look at a lake and decide to approach it.

9:40For one, we can, you know, come to a lake and be like, oh, this lake is 300 feet wide and I cannot cast to the other side, so I cannot fish with Tenkara. And that's, you know, it's like one of those things a lot of people think, oh, you know, you don't have reach with a Tenkara rod, so you probably can't fish lakes very effectively. And that's because they're thinking of reaching the other side of a lake. And that's not a good approach, you know. it's my experience if that's how you think then yeah Tenkara rod is not going to be ideal for fishing in a lake so first of all we have to realize that you know there's a lot of fish nearby when you're fishing lakes they're not even though you might not be able to see them readily they are pretty close to us a lot of times and there's two main approaches to fishing a lake with a Tenkara rod in my opinion. We can choose to walk around the lake and go try to find fish or try to find fishing like likely fishy spots or we can kind of hang in one area of the lake and realize the fish are actually cruising a lot and they might find us instead. Both of those can work in a variety of situations there's actually a cool thread in our forum tenkarausa.com forward slash forum where i believe it was matt donovan who lives in nevada he fishes lakes a fair amount and a few years ago he recounted being in a competition i forget if it was a specific like one fly thing or whatnot but it was a fly fishing competition in a lake and matt had been doing tenkara for a little while and he went there with his tenkara rod this is fairly on fairly early on uh since we introduced tenkara here but matt's approach was as he described uh was to stay you know in the shoreline and covering about a hundred feet or so of the lake or maybe it was last maybe or maybe he said 100 yards but covering this really short section of the shore kind of walking kind of from one side to the other as the competition started everybody just kind of spread out and almost every single person had flow tubes on them and they were going into the lake to catch those fish that were 300 feet away or more and they went in there and matt's kind of approach is just staying right there in this little section of the stream and wait for the fish that were cruising by to come in and i believe i might be wrong but i know matt did really really well in that competition and i believe he actually won first place don't quote me on that i don't have the thread in front of me but he did really really well better than the majority of people so he took that approach of letting the fish come and find him as opposed to him kind of spending all this energy to go find fish. I think that works really, really well. You know, it's when you kind of, you get to a certain area of a lake on the shore that looks comfortable for you to hang out. First of all, when you get there and you're not doing a whole lot of moving around, it lets the fish kind of settle to the fact that you're there and maybe kind of forget you a little bit. So they kind of start coming out of the depths and becoming a little bit more eager to eat flies as opposed to if you just keep moving a lot of times you know like if you're walking in a lake especially if you walk a little faster or stomp a little harder on the ground the fish will go down and it might be a few minutes before they come back out and start eating again so if you stay in one area and move very lightly and move very little, I think there's a really good chance of fish coming and eating your fly.

13:46The drawback on that one is, first of all, you have to find a really good section of a lake. You know, sometimes if you come to a section that is really, really shallow, maybe it's not really all that convenient for fish to hang out there. It depends a lot on the lake and the weather, of course. but you first have to identify the one area where you think that there's a likelihood that there's going to be a lot of fish hanging nearby the other approach to fishing lakes from the shore is to circumvent kind of go around the periphery of a lake and either try to spot fish do some site fishing or look for structures and things in the lake on the lake bed maybe kind of drops off or maybe there is a tree that is kind of like submerged. Look for the structures where the fish are and then casting into those. And I'll talk a little bit more about techniques in a minute. The third approach, I mentioned those two kind of main approaches, which are fishing from the shore, which is how I pretty much always fish lakes.

14:50But the third approach is to be in the water. Get on a flow tube, a little boat, or a stand-up paddleboard and go into the lake and then you can do pretty much the same thing you can either keep paddling around until you find fish which is usually not a very good technique in my opinion or kind of let the wind take you and drift a little bit into the lake or just kind of hang out and keep casting in a certain area you know i think i don't know enough um i don't fish enough lakes to know really the if one approach is always better than the other i don't have a super strong preference if my wife and I are going to a lake near home usually what I do is I just keep walking around the lake and I'll fish you know we'll stop a little bit fish five six seven casts in one area walk a little bit farther so that we don't get tired and bored of being in one exact area if we're going to like an alpine lake and you know I'm tired from a hike I might stay put you close to where we're having a picnic or something.

16:00But sometimes I think that the other side of the lake looks really good, and I'll go walk around. And as I walk, I might try fishing in a few different spots. So bottom line here is there's, in my opinion, no right or wrong approach. If you find an area that looks really, really good, you can stay with it and keep trying that area. and of course if you're catching fish keep trying that the area in the area nearby because there's a lot of fish of course now you know like in i think there's differences as well based on the fish that we're going after bluegill bass trout they all behave a little bit differently but not by much in my experience you know the fish are they tend to kind of be guarding their territory a little bit, some of them, and they'll be kind of aggressive trying to eat as much as they can. Sometimes they'll be kind of cruising around trying to find a good area, trying to find food. I think that all depends a little bit on the conditions, like the weather, the temperatures, the fish themselves. I mean, sometimes I'll notice that one trout might be kind of cruising and going a fairly long distance. Sometimes I'll see a trout that is just kind of hanging in one kind of spot and I might adapt my approach a little bit to either one. If I see like a couple of trout kind of cruising a long ways I know that the fish are cruising and trying to find food so I can feel a little bit more comfortable staying in one area. Other times I've been out fishing you know in the ponds here like for bass and a lot of bass tend to be very territorial so I find it best and most effective for me to be walking around very quietly and very slowly trying to find those beds where the beds are kind of protecting their territory other times of the year you know the beds might be kind of moving around a little bit more so it kind of varies a little bit I don't have a silver bullet or one answer for you I just kind of want to share that varies a little bit based on what I want to do, based on what I see the fish doing, and just based on how I feel that day. Now, in terms of technique and flies, so let's talk about flies for a second. When it comes to flies, we can take a couple of different approaches. We can do that kind of tenkara approach that I've been talking about for years of using pretty much one fly or more accurately, just not paying a huge amount of attention to the fly.

18:43You know, that approach we talk about, you know, in terms of flies is the idea that the fly doesn't matter as much as a lot of people think. Fish are trying to maximize the food intake that they have, and they're trying to maximize their opportunities to eat. And, you know, like rather than being very meticulous about the flies that are going to eat, they might act and try to take something that appeals to them based on movement, based on the fact that it looks like food and so forth. So that's one approach. The other approach is to use flies that people like to recommend, perhaps imitative flies or flies that maybe look a little bit different from tenkara flies that might have some kind of triggers in lakes? I do both. So when it comes to mountain streams and rivers, I'm very much a one-fly kind of guy. When it comes to lakes, I have found myself that, you know, I just, either because I don't have so much confidence, you know, because I don't fish them quite as much, but also based on my previous experience before I got into Tenkara where I fished lakes and I kind of saw a few flies that seem to work really well. So I take both approaches. Sometimes I would just go with my regular kit and catch plenty of fish on the one fly approach with Tenkara. Sometimes I'll actually go through my old fishing gear and take a woolly bugger or take some kind of longer, especially longer flies, a little bit bigger kind of flies and heavier. And those kinds of flies, especially of the woolly bugger looking kind of flies. To me, they're considerably different from a tenkara fly enough to the point where it warrants me using them. So a tenkara fly has this kind of relatively low profile, even a larger fly, and I'm talking about the reverse hacklefly specifically.

20:40And it might imitate a lot of different insects, mayfly nymphs, it might imitate cadduses, but it doesn't really do a good job at suggesting a leech or suggesting some kind of, you know, maybe a small fish or some kind of life, like worms even, that might be found on a lake in places that are slower moving water. So I find that having those flies at my disposal is a good kind of, you know, tool to have in my arsenal. Now, you know, either one works fine in my opinion and mostly, you know, I might change my techniques a little bit, but mostly I use the leech kind of patterns like the woolly buggers. When I want something really big that's really going to entice that aggressive bass. And primarily I'm using those flies if I'm going after bass. Trout, I feel like I can get away with one fly a little bit more.

21:45now in terms of techniques and that's where kind of uh you know i think you know that every fly is going to be different and there's a lot of room for us to do different things and but my approach here is like okay let's say i find a piece of water and i'm casting um first of all maybe i should talk instead about techniques first let me talk about my equipment because i started talking about flies sorry about that i do have my notes here and i realize i think it's probably better that I cover the equipment that I'm using. My equipment in lakes is pretty similar to medium-sized streams. I'm using a 12 to 13-foot rod. Actually, for the most part, I'm using the Ito, which is a 13-foot or 14-feet 7-inch rod, just to get a little extra reach out there. And primarily, I'm probably using it at 13 feet, which is a little bit more comfortable. at the end of the rod i'm tying a line that is not that much longer than the rod usually i'm using about a 15 foot line level line and four to five feet of tippet 5x tippet at the end of that and i think it's important to mention that because um sometimes we tend to think that we have to have this super long lines to fish in lakes and that's not really the case you can reach a lot of water by having this 13-foot rod, 15 or so feet of line, you know, maybe an extra two feet if you want, and then four to five feet of tippet.

23:19Occasionally, I'll have like 17 feet of line, four feet of tippet. So I don't have a formula, but I tend to stay away from very long lines when I'm fishing in lakes. You know, I think I usually go up to 17 feet of line plus four or five feet of tippet. And the reason for that is because there's plenty of fish close by, but also in lakes if you're fishing from the shore a lot of lakes might have a lot of vegetation around and trees like if if you're fishing alpine lakes and I find myself you know you dealing with more line tangles and things getting caught than I wish so I tend to stay a little bit shorter than you might think is appropriate for lakes I don't think you need to fish super long lines but hey it's kind of like the episode where I talk about long lines a couple of weeks ago you can experiment you know you can start adding two to three feet of line at a time and see how it feels to do that okay now that I talked about the equipment in a brief intro to flies let me talk a little bit about technique so technique there's a few different ways to present a fly in a lake the one thing we don't have in the lake is currents taking the flies you know to different places and kind of doing the natural drift of a fly as we might see and there's two kind of main techniques that i like to use depending on where i'm going for so let me talk about fishing ponds for bass and bluegill first of all and it's very applicable to trout as well. But when I feel like the fish are a little bit more active, one of the techniques that I like to do is to cast, get as much reach as I can, and then just kind of slowly kind of drag the fly towards the shore or to its sides. And just kind of, it's as if an insect kind of fell in the water and started swimming to the shore. First, I usually think I like to kind of cast and they just kind of slowly move the fly like in a very steady pace and just kind of start dragging it to the shore sometimes you'll get a bite like it's a really fun aggressive take when you're doing that sometimes i'll just kind of do this more kind of a pulsating movement towards the shore kind of like more jigging like um just kind of like small little pulls until it gets close to the shore and then i'll cast again so the first presentation that i use in lakes is to have a lot of movement um you know and that typically acts uh works really well for when the fish are very aggressive like bluegill in the summer for example or bass uh they can get very very aggressive and they they're very predatorial so they kind of need to see this thing with movement before they get really interested but then after that it's a little bit of a variation of different movements and seeing how fish behave.

26:23And I experiment a lot when I'm fishing in the beginning of the day. So I might do a very slowly, steady kind of movement to the shore. I might cast again and do it very fast. Like at a, you know, just kind of, let's say I'm casting 30 feet out and I'll get from 30 feet to about 10 feet from me or less in about two to three seconds. So a very fast kind of movement. Um, the other thing is like, you know, you can cast, let the fly sink. So cast and just wait, let the fly sink to a certain water column and then pull it to the shore or cast, let it sink and just kind of jig it towards, towards the shore, kind of like a streamer. So that's one technique that I find works really well for bluegill, bass, trout as well, especially brook trout. I've had a lot of fun fishing alpine lakes with a lot of brook trout during the summer especially, just kind of casting and just quickly kind of dragging. And if you're dragging on the surface, sometimes you kind of see the fish just jumping and doing this perioat, you know, like just flips as they try to attack this escaping fly.

27:34so bottom line here is that there's a lot of experimentation that you can do with you know your flags just kind of by giving him movement that way the second technique is a little bit more of a passive technique typically more like winter months or fish a little bit slower maybe there's a colder front that came in and the more passive technique is essentially I cast and whether I'm using weighted flies or unweighted I'll let the fly sink and you know and usually it's good to get an idea how fast the fly is sinking before you cast in case you cannot see the fly sinking so put it in front of you and see how what kind of pace it takes how much time it takes to get to the bottom where you can see it and then you can just kind of get an idea how long it's going to take to get to the bottom at the end of your reach. But this second approach is a more passive approach of casting and waiting, letting the fly sink as far as you get or until whatever water column seems to make sense to you. And usually, you know, in my experience, it's like five to as long as 30 seconds or even a minute if it's a very deep kind of clear lake.

28:53and as the fly sinks I've had a few takes as the fly is sinking definitely mostly what I've seen though is as the fly sinks you know and the water kind of settled there's no you know like nothing no disturbance to the water as the fly starts sinking I've seen a lot of fish coming in and checking it out sometimes they'll circle around the fly but in any case the fly is sinking and They come and check it out. But then there's something that you got to do to trigger that fish. And what I love to do, it's one of my favorite things to do, I think, when I can see the fly especially. I let the fly sink either close to the bottom or until I see a fish coming close by and twitch it. Just like two little short pulls just to make the fly indicate that it's alive. And then the fish very often get triggered by that motion and they'll take it. and that works for beautifully for bluegill bass and trout any kind of fish i haven't tried that for carp yet but i suspect it could work well although carp i think they usually like to kind of go over something that's not really moving in my experience that approach also works really well in streams when you find a calmer pool of water and you're able to let your fly sink and then just kind of twitch it a little bit to indicate that it's alive that very often will trigger fish and I'm actually working on a book um that should come out hopefully in the spring and I have an episode or I have a chapter talking about that experience um I'll save the story for the book so I don't so I have something to share with you but in any case uh so those are my approaches to fishing lakes i'd love to know what you uh if you especially if you do more lake fishing than i do what do you do for successfully fishing lakes um i find that that works fine i don't you know i kind of like with my stream fishing i don't usually carry i actually really don't carry split shot or indicators uh when i'm lake fishing um i like to keep the line kind of tight so i can see if there's a take or see, you know, through the water if I can. I will carry occasionally heavier flies just to kind of sink a little bit faster. Again, my line is usually not that much longer than a rod, usually about two to four or five feet longer at the most, plus four feet of tippet at the end of that. Longer rods, always better in a lake in my experience. And my my approaches sometimes i'll walk around and sometimes i'll stay put and that typically is more of what i want to do but sometimes it's also based on what i'm seeing the fish you know doing if they're cruising more than staying put and then in techniques uh sometimes i'll play around a lot in the very beginning of the day but sometimes more active presentations where i'm kind of pulling the fly giving it action pulling on the surface pulling a little bit deeper in the water column sometimes a little bit more of a passive kind of presentation where I let the fly sink a fair amount and then I just indicate that the fly is alive and see if a fish takes so those are my tips those are my techniques for fishing in lakes if you have some suggestions do share with us tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast and I think the next episode is going to be in a couple weeks from now, so right around Christmas time, we'll try to get something out. Actually, probably right after Christmas, I'm going to try to continue putting the episodes out on Wednesdays or Thursdays, mostly Thursdays, and I'm looking at my calendar. The next episode might come out right at New Year's, probably on the 30th or 31st. I'll try to make that happen.

32:49And if I miss that one, it's going to be coming out on the 7th of January. And, oh, just a note, if you are in the Colorado region, January 8th through 10th, I'm looking at my calendar, 8th through 10th, we have the Fly Fishing Show taking place in Denver. And that's always a really fun show. This year, we're also supporting the Women's Showcase in the Fly Fishing Show. that should be really fun. I'll have a couple of presentations happening, a couple of demonstrations, so join us for that. And after that, on the 29th through the 31st of January, we're going to be in Somerset, New Jersey at the Fly Fishing Show. All right, everyone, hopefully you enjoy a terrific holiday season. If you don't hear my voice before then, have a terrific Christmas. Happy holidays to everyone and hopefully you get out to go fishing as well during the holidays hopefully it's not too cold for you thank you very much for listening to the Tenkara Cast i'd like to extend a special thank you to nick ogawa also known as Takenobu check out his music at takenobumusic.com we'll be posting links to any references we made in this podcast such as Takenobu's music on our website, www.tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast.

34:21And until next time on the Tenkara Cast.