Further to my fly fishing for micros efforts I decided to try the Red River, a large, imposing, turbid, prairie river with little evident structure. So why try it? It’s home to a large variety of minnows and only a short drive away.
The challenge was to present my small flies effectively in the murky water and I assembled a rig to hopefully address that issue. I tied on a visible attractor fly followed by a tiny streamer, size #24 on a tag end.
The setup worked, I hooked several minnows but what has become the norm, they got off before I could land them. Not yet sure if this is poor technique, bad luck or the result of using barbless hooks; the sample size is just too small. The minnows I have landed usually had the hooks deep in their mouth.
A bonus to this method of fishing is that some fish are caught on the attractor fly. In yesterday’s session the ancillary catch was a small pike, rock bass and smallmouth bass.
The smallmouth bass holds a special interest for me, it’s the first of its kind caught by me in this watershed although I have heard of others. Could these fish becoming more common because of global warming? If so, what other centrarchids; bass, crappies and sunfish, might be moving up the Red River from their American home?
Stewart in “The Freshwater Fishes of Manitoba” points out possible catches of white crappie, green sunfish, pumpkinseeds, orangespotted sunfish, green sunfish and longear sunfish.
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