Only wackos would have ventured out today. Or geezers.

Jim & I had the river to ourselves today. Normal people don’t head out when the weathermen are talking about temps in the 30s, three inches of rain, 20mph winds with gusts to 50 and a flood watch in place.

I guess we ain’t normal. But we are old. And we are both fully aware that there are way more fishing days behind us than ahead of us. We aren’t about to waste what looked to be a 4 to 5 hour window of semi-tolerable conditions this morning. So Jim & I met at the Derby ramp at 6:30 in the morning, and were on the water by 6:45. We figured if everything went well, we could make it until noon or thereabouts before the weather turned completely to crap. By 7, we had found fish not too far south of the confluence of the Naugy & the Housy. Even though they weren’t all that big, they were biting, and biting fish can make marginally tolerable conditions seem downright comfortable.

Unfortunately, by 7:30, they stopped biting. Comfortable quickly deteriorated right back to marginally tolerable. Still, we were only 45 minutes into the day, and I had 10 and Jim had 7. Seventeen fish in the first 45 minutes certainly is an improvement over the kind of bite we’ve experienced lately, so we still held out hope for a productive day.

Well, once we got past that first school of fish we found well up river, we didn’t mark another fish until we got down by the Island between the marinas. From there, except for the shallow flat at Beacon Point, we never stopped marking fish all the way down to the cove at the Shelton Dump. I caught a grand total of one fish out of the thousands and thousands we marked. Inside the dump cove, we each got another fish. But it was 10:30 by the time Jim got his eighth. Our potentially productive morning had turned to squat.

The water level was so high it was tough to tell when the tide finally hit full high, but it was sometime between then and when we finally got back on fish upriver, almost within sight of the mouth of the Naugatuck. They were stacked pretty thick there — just like the fish that had been frustrating us down river for most of the morning, and like those fish, they seemed oblivious to our lures drifting, swimming, bouncing and dragging through their midst.

Then just before noon, the tide turned. It still wasn’t ripping out, but at least there was some noticeable current. And finally, the fish started to bite. That was about 11:40, and between then and 12:50, our tally went from 12 and 8 to 32 and 19. The current wasn’t real strong, but we got a good swing bite going with 1/4 ounce heads and 4″ Fin-S Fish.

For the uninitiated, a swing bite is when you toss the bait cross current or slightly upcurrent, and just maintain feel, rather than retrieving it. You let it swing in the current as it drifts downstream until it reaches the point of equilibrium, where the current, depth, line diameter, weight and the bulk and buoyancy of the plastic lure body fall into balance, and the bait just hangs in the current, wiggling slightly. That’s when most of the swing bite hits happen. Just after the bait stops swinging. Typically, we’re doing that on an outgoing tide in the Housy with a half ounce weight and a 5″ bait. When our hot bite started today, the current wasn’t strong enough to swing the half ounce head to the liking of the fish. But the little 1/4 ounce head proved to be just the right deal, and we caught them pretty good for an hour or so. I did switch off to a half ounce head and caught a few on it when the current seemed to increase some, but then my bite kind of died.

Jim did get one more fish, just after 1pm. It was the first fish over about 20 inches we’d seen all day, and it was in a completely different league than all the fish we’d been catching on the same swing bite from the same spot.

The last fish we boated was the only 'keeper' of the day. Jim got this one between 31 and 32 inches fishing exactly the same way as we caught more tha 50 sub-20 inch fish.

If Jim looks a little wet in that picture, that’s because he was soaked through to the skin by that time. Our moderate rain had long since turned to heavy, and our earlier trip down river had put us in the teeth of the nastiest wind. By 1pm, if I had caught anything picture-worthy, I’m sure I would have looked as uncomfortable as Jim.

We made a few more casts after Jim’s 31″+ fish, but for all intents and purposes, we were done when I lipped that good fish for Jim. We had the boat on the trailer and were headed for home by 1:30.

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