On saturday, I took a couple guys to the Narrows for their first time. We stepped into the water at 8am. In the next hour and a half, they hooked and landed five silvers apiece. I was low man with one fish. They were all about 20". These fish were a few inches larger than the ones I caught last weekend. The guys at Morning Hatch had also heard that the fish were larger this past week. Today, looking for an encore, I got into the water at 7am in the fog and searched for some big guys that sometimes sneak into the shoreline at high tide for some easy pickings. I walked and searched in vain all the while thinking I should have taken Bill Hamilton up on his invitation to join him at the golf course lake with the 6 to 8 pound stockers. At 9am, I hooked my first silver while blind casting a small baitfish pattern into some likely water. The tide was really moving out now and in the next hour and a half, I landed 12 nice silvers between 15 and 20' long. All on the same sparse little #8 clauser. The small pods of fish stopped coming by around 10:30 and at 11, the sun burned the fog away and I headed back up the beach to my car. On the way back, I saw this old flyfishers dream about 20 feet off shore. A large school of silvers were - as I call it - purposefully porpoising on euphasids or amphipods, hell, call 'em shrimpies. It was the first time I had seen it this season and I immediately came down with buck fever. It's amazing how, after all these years, I can still wrap a flyline, drop a loop, and otherwise shank a cast to a working school of fish. Luckily it didn't matter. As soon as I dropped the fly into the middle of the school, they all ignored it. They snubbed the second cast even though it was the better of the two. After I took the offending clauser off, I tied on a #10 euphasid (white crazy charlie), while running down the beach following the school. On my next cast, I hooked a nice silver. It and the next five were all 20" clones and they were all great jumpers in the thin water next to the beach. It was so easy, all I had to do was drop my fly into the middle of the school. At noon, it was all over. What made this all the more amazing was that the shrimping fish were doing it in a dead slack tide under a bright sun. It was a day when I caught fish with a baitfish pattern (under a cloudy/foggy sky) when they should have been on euphasids. And I caught the best fish on shrimp patterns when it was bright and still. And even weirder, I didn't see any jumping fish until later, when they were on the photosensitive shrimpies. A day for the books, I'd say. Leland.
