The Haw Finally Delivers

Lately I've been in a little of a funk. Work has been a little stressful and there is the possibility of a major life change in the works. Fishing hasn't been my first priority. When life seems hectic it makes me want to fish even more. When I am fishing I don't think about anything but the current moment. The weather has cooled some and I wanted to get on the water. There is a pond close by that I have been fishing recently but it hasn't been very good. Really I wanted to be in a river. My closest choices are the Neuse and the Haw. Neither river has been very kind in the bass dept. I figured what the heck and decided to make a short trip to the Haw.

The water level was perfect and it was very clear. I didn't see much fish activity but with in 5 min I had a decent largemouth on. It made the evening seem very promising. I hit various spots that I knew had to hold bass. I missed strikes here and there. I noticed some menacing clouds overhead and I knew rain was coming fast. My plan was to work the structure in a close area. I went about 10min with out any action what so ever. I had some bluegill playing with my fly but I never had anything of substantial size. This was my first time applying knowledge I was reluctant to use mostly because I didn't think of it myself. In the end the advice was right on and it paid off.

What was the advice? Use big flies and think about edges. Usually when I went for large mouth I was using what I thought were big flies. Poppers size 10 or 8. I was told that is way too small. The size I needed to use was at least a 4 or 2. To me that seemed monstrous for a largemouth. After catching that first bass on a sneaky pete and looking at what I thought was a big fly in the fish's mouth I realized that sz4 fly wasn't so big.

The clouds became more menacing but I continued to work edges and stayed at the edge of the storm. I had all the edgy advice put into action on a good spot. I made probably one of my best casts of the day, twitched the fly a couple times and heard the sweet sound of GULP! I could tell the fish was a pretty good size by how it bent my 8wt. When it jumped my heart really started racing. This was by far the biggest largemouth I had caught not only on the Haw but with a fly. It ran for some rocks and jumped few times showing me how dangerously close my sneaky pete was to coming out of its mouth. In the end the fish surrendered and I had my first good river bass. I played around with my video camera on this trip. I was lucky enough to get the whole thing on video. It's a few minutes in. The date in the beginning of the video is wrong. I was too lazy to change it.