One of the great pleasures of growing up in West Central Indiana is the vast choices of different rivers and creeks to fis, some big and some small. You all know Sugar Creek and the Tippecanoe River but most of you probably don't know the small streams. I will talk about small waters but won't name names if you know what i mean. I love my small creeks but they are private and small and don't need the pressure. What you should consider are the small creeks in you area and do some of the same things.
Small creeks almost always have a very simple forage base. Rarely is a small creek as biologically diverse as a big river. Most all small creeks have a limited number of bait fish and there is little diversity. Small stream Smallmouth undoubtedly eat more crawdads during the year than their big water relatives. Small stream Smallmouth are also very dependent on terrestrials. Most of the small creeks I fish run through pasture and that means HOPPERS!!!
For this day though it was early season and it was all about the crawdad. With the high water we have had the bigger water takes time to come down, where as the small creek falls out in 24 hours. I spent today walking two different creeks in two different watersheds. One was a trib to Sugar Creek and the other across to another valley about 20 minutes away.
I fished the Sugar trib early figuring some large fish may have run up from Sugar to get out of the high water but if they were there I couldn't find them. So I made the move over a watershed and it was a good choice. I fished crawdads and it was good. The fish I caught were chunky 14-16 inch fish, perfect fish in small creeks. I fished a couple of different colors of crawdads in the olive to orange range with an indicator. The water was still a little high but clear on these creeks so the indicator was a help keeping track of the fly.
Comments