March 25, 2023 – Mentored Mitch Day – SEPA Crick

He put on a show!

The weather was iffy, but the boy and I found a productive window from about 3:15 to 5 PM to take a swing at the fresh stockies.  The creek down the street has been low, so the quarter to half an inch of rain only improved fishing, adding a stain that made the fish silly.  I bet he landed a dozen in that short window, and he had several more on and many, many bumps.  I was mostly playing rod caddy and helping to land and quickly release the fish.  A CD 3 Rapala with barbs crimped down did the trick.  Some things never change though.  Longtime readers of this here blog may remember my love/hate relationship with these very effective, rather expensive, and very poorly made plugs.  I used to send broken ones back by the dozen until the service department sent me a cease and desist letter.  Well, they replaced them for a while, then changed the form letter to say the users were “dredging” them and “whacking” them on the surface to clean off algae, you know fishing a sinking plug….  Most of the time none of that was true, and certainly none of that was true with the boy today.  He had two plugs break in under two hours.  The first was the classic diving lip cracking.  The second was a rarer one—the rear of the plug broke and the back trebles were just dangling on exposed wire.  I have just been going through old stock, so I did not care.  A moment to tie on a new one, and we were back in action.  However, I saw the price of them at Dick’s this year!  Unbelievable for a poorly made POS.  Anyway, the boy let me catch three while demonstrating.  We also had a big old golden that was a player.  He charged the plug three times but never got got.  I also rolled an enormous rainbow while demonstrating a new retrieve for the boy.  It was a fun afternoon, and he’s excited to get after them, maybe even with the fly rod, after Opening Day in much nicer weather.