Upper Otay Lake 6/1

So as to not waste anyone's time, I caught no fish on this trip. Read on if you want, I just want to write this down. It's part of the routine.

Scott and I arranged, via text messages, to meet at Upper Otay at 3:30 p.m. giving us time to watch the Padres play the Giants - or at least time for the outcome to become clear, and enough time to get plenty of fishing in before the lake closed.

I was trying to figure out where all the anglers who owned the other cars in the lot were fishing, when I saw a coyote about 50 yards from some shore anglers. While Scott and I geared up - float tubing is gear intensive - Adrian Gonzalez hit a 2-run home run to make the score 3-1 Padres. We turned off the radio and got in the water after Trevor Hoffman blew only his 3rd save of the season. We were in the water when the game ended, my phone rang once and I kept getting messages from Giants fans. They wouldn't call to congratulate me on a Padres sweep of the Giants, so I guessed the Giants won.

If you've read any previous entries on Upper Otay you know I've had a difficult time there. That's probably what keeps me interested. I've done a lot of research, bought flies, tied flies, tried different techniques, asked peoples' advice. Bluegill are something I'd never targeted before this year. Today, after about an hour, I thought I'd try something I'd read about in couple sources, but hadn't yet tried. After losing another white woolly bugger, I pulled one of my trout-fly boxes, and tied on a tiny bead-head nymph, called a hare's ear.

It wasn't three casts up tight to some dead branches sticking up out of the water, before I felt a very light resistance, and raised my rod to briefly find a small bluegill wiggling on my line. Sometimes when you hook a very small fish, it doesn't offer enough resistance to set the hook into its jaw. The little bluegill wiggled off the hook. This often happens while fishing surf perch. But, it was progress. A fly I'd never tried before, but that I'd heard worked for bluegill had yielded nearly immediate results.

A few casts later, after a very light strip of my fly line, I noticed the line tug lightly away from me, so again, I held the line and raised the rod tip sharply. This time I was sure the hook bit, but almost as soon as the fight started, the fish wrapped around an underwater branch. I could tell, from the fight, this was a bigger bluegill than the first. Using something I learned fishing for spotted bay bass off the rocks of Sand Diego Bay, I gave the fish some slack, hoping it'd get itself unwrapped. the fish did take off, line peeling behind it, but failed to unwrap from the submerged branch. Sometimes, flies get stuck in these branches and we can reach into the water and yank the fly out. I reached my arm into the water as deep as I could, probably mid-bicep, but couldn't reach the branch. Finally, I gave one last tug, thinking it'd either snap the branch and free the fish, or it'd snap my tippet, and also free the fish. Unfortunately, it broke my tippet. Two hooked, two lost.

I decided to stay in the area, because I knew there were fish there, and that my flies were working, but Scott was working further around the lake. On three more occasions in the next half an hour I saw a gentle movement of my line or felt the light tug of another bluegill, but again, they wrapped around submerged branches and either got off the hook or broke my tippet.

I cut off my tippet and tied on a new tippet from a different spool, and tied on a small bluegill surface popper. I'd been hearing and seeing fish break the surface. Of course, as soon as I started working the popper, I stopped seeing and hearing fish break surface.

I tied on a small, black woolly bugger, but got no bites for the rest of the evening. The ranger came by around 7:20 to sound the closing alarm to end our evening.

Though I landed no fish, the discovery of a productive fly for bluegill gives me hope for a more productive future at UO. No new bird species today, and there seemed to be fewer birds overall. The weeds are really starting to fill in from the edges out...