Carp, cicadas an explosive mix at Smith Mountain Lake
At Smith Mountain Lake, bass and carp are especially fond of orange and black insects.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
HUDDLESTON — Like a flexible torpedo, the fish appeared from the shadows and made its way toward the fly.
Slurp.
Doug Jessie reared back on his nine-weight fly rod, which bowed in a deep arc and bounced wildly.
“Yes!” shouted Jessie, as he dug in for the battle against one of the largest fish he’d ever hooked on a fly.
So what if it was a carp?
Actually, the fact that it was a carp was the best part.
Jessie is a trout fanatic, a guy who loves to creep around tiny mountain streams casting little dry flies with tiny fly rods for tiny native brook trout.
But the Roanoke resident has had carp on the brain since a friend and fellow member of the Smith River chapter of Trout Unlimited started sending him pictures of the bruiser carp he was catching on flies at Smith Mountain Lake.
Hey, what fly angler can help but be a little intrigued by the idea of getting dozens of shots at 5- to 15-pound fish in a morning on the lake?
After all, the hope for that kind of fishing prompts some fly fishermen to drop big money to fly south to chase bonefish on tropical flats.
Carp are close.
They are cheap.
They are strong.
And they are looking up.
Cicadas are the reason the fish are feeding on the surface.
To humans, the noisy bugs, which have emerged from the ground en masse across a good swath of central Virginia are, well, noisy.
But while the mass emergence of periodical cicadas can be an annoyance to humans, the insects are a boon to wildlife.
“One big protein bomb,” Jessie said.
Larger birds gorge on cicadas, a nd when the bugs land in the water, fish jump on them in a hurry.
At Smith Mountain Lake, bass and carp are especially fond of the orange and black insects. Even channel catfish will make a rare exception to their bottom-feeding tendencies to pluck a cicada off the surface.
Parkway’s James Clayton even heard of a striped bass that had become fond of the bugs.
“We had someone come in here and say, ‘There’s a 3-foot-long striper by my dock eating cicadas. What should I use to fish for it with?’ ” Clayton said, shaking his head and laughing.
Last spring, an emergence of a 17-year brood affected the upper end of Smith Mountain Lake, as well as parts of Botetourt County such as the land along the James River and the shoreline of the Carvins Cove reservoir.
One fisherman who collected live cicadas and then fished them below a bobber at Carvins Cove last spring referred to his action-packed day as Carpageddon.
This year’s emergence is another 17-year brood, Brood II to be specific.
Jessie and I, who started planning our outing during a drive back from the Smith River TU meeting in early June, weren’t expecting Carpageddon Two.
With this year’s emergence winding down, fewer bugs are ending up on the water.
Even so, after a month of gorging, Smith Mountain Lake’s surface vacuums are conditioned to be on the lookout for cicadas.
We had worked along just a short section of shoreline in Craddock Creek when we spotted a pair of cruising carp.
Jessie put his fly on the mark, but before the carp could get to it a 20-inch-long largemouth bass appeared from a shadow and slammed the fly.
A typical 20-inch bass in June might weigh 3 1⁄2 pounds, but this bass was 4 pounds, easy, with the gut of a guy who’s spent a few too many lunches at the Golden Corral buffet.
A few minutes after Jessie released the bass we spotted another cruising carp. I dropped a fly a few feet ahead of it and the fish did what it was supposed to do, sucking in the foam bug with confidence.
The fish was a 4-pounder, but felt much stronger.
Some fly anglers call carp golden bones, in homage to the iconic bonefish.
But, unlike bonefish, carp don’t take off on long sizzling runs. Instead, they are bulldog fighters.
We spent the next three hours moving along the shoreline, casting to cruising fish. Most were carp, but we saw plenty of largemouth bass.
Not all were as cooperative as those first two.
If the fish saw the boat, there was no hope of drawing a strike. Even many that appeared to be ready to eat would nose the fly, then spin away when they realized it wasn’t a real insect.
Still, good casts and smart approaches were rewarded often enough to keep us busy and the final tally was high enough that we lost count, which is always a good sign.
The action all but stopped as noon approached, perhaps because the fish had to retreat to the depths to digest their morning feast, or because the personal watercraft and water skiing armada was starting its daily emergence.
This hatch, to use fly fishing lingo, is on the downslope. If we’re lucky, we might have a couple more weeks during which fish are keyed on big, black and orange protein bombs.
Different cicada broods will appear throughout Virginia in the coming years, and the emergences will trigger good fishing.
But for action like this at Smith Mountain Lake, once this year’s fun is done we can start looking forward to 2029 and 2030.
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THE ROANOKE TIMES
