Little 'southern gentlemen' are tough charmers
Longear sunfish are bright spots for an ultralight, childlike, summer fun
Regret infects the angler who owes a youngster another shot at the best fishin’ hole he could experience. Dang it, anyway.
I jumped the gun this spring and brought a young friend and his father to the best little spot for aggressive sunfish I know. Graham Bevel is owed a return trip to Spring Creek after the weather and water warm a bit more and the sunfish gather in the shallows. His dad, Shane, can come along again too.
Thanks to generous landowners, I’ve introduced a few lucky youngsters to what an actual clear-water Oklahoma stream can offer.
We left behind a glorious and enjoyable blue-sky morning with Graham, but we had very few catches.
In crystal clear shallows, traces of sunfish beds, not yet busy but clearly defined, amazed me. How can those little beds, pale patches fanned out of the sandy, gravel shallows by palm-sized finned warriors year after year, withstand the tests of Mother Nature’s occasional fury and the power of dry winds in drought and flooding current in storms?
All I could show my friends was that evidence of what was and what will be again when the weather is right. Rather than find gangs of angry little longear sunfish defending their territory, we found only a few Neosho smallmouths getting into that same mode. But the smallies were shy of anything moving above the crystalline waters they call home and not yet particularly aggressive—at least not all of them.
Having the young beginner for one-on-one instruction until his father could catch up with us brought back some things this empty-nester had forgotten.
Always rig two rods: The kid will get tangles and snags. It’s inevitable. Be ready to hand off the other rod to keep them fishing while you clear or re-tie the first and get it back in order.
Don’t instruct too much. Give them some basics that get them going, and let them learn. They’ll figure out what works as they get the line out in the water—or not. There is such a thing as too much teaching. My favorite Graham line of the day went something like this:
“Hey, let’s just take two seconds and work on your roll cast over here, and I bet it’ll help you catch those fish.”
As kids do, he pointed out that there was literally no way to complete a lesson in just two seconds.
Then he said, “I just want to catch these fish first.”
I chuckled at the pure logic of a 9-year-old going on 10. Obviously, I’d hit him with adult instructional overload—what some folks might call nagging.
I eventually provided Graham with a clear plastic container that holds miscellaneous flies I seldom use. I dumped the flies in my vest pocket, and he improved the vessel’s status by gathering an impressive array of invertebrates, including tadpoles and crawfish so tiny I would have required a magnifying glass and tweezers to collect them.
Oh, to have those sharp youngster’s eyes and deft fingertips again.
We need to get that kid busy learning to tie Orvis and no-slip loop knots with a 5X tippet. (wink)
After a lunch break, we gave it a short try again, but we were all a little pooped out. Upon their departure, Graham said he had fun anyway. Who says kids these days don’t know how to be polite?
They left for home, but I positioned my truck under a shade tree for perfect wind flow with the doors and tailgate open and had a nap, a hard nap, an inadvertent 2 1/2 hour-long nap that saw me rise groggy and a little confused about the time loss. I reached for my Stanley Classic, which, like me, is training to be more a water jug than a coffee dispenser.
Ice water, with just the slightest lingering scent of 20-plus years of coffee. Not the wake-up I’d hoped for, but it relieved my scratchy gullet.
Calls of a red-eyed vireo caught my ear as I stood and stretched the contours of the Nissan Pathfinder out of my back. I only knew the bird’s name because I grabbed my phone and hit the Merlin app. I’ve learned the advantage of using that app for birds because I recognize so many but struggle with what sounds go with which bird.
“I’ve heard that before. What is it?”
I’m convinced those names are stored in the same part of my brain that is supposed to put people’s names with faces, an embarrassingly feeble part.
Red-eyed vireo popped up on the screen, then another, an indigo bunting. The bunting calls were entirely new for me. I’ve seen many, but I can’t claim I’ve listened to their song.
I grabbed the binoculars, went bird-watching, and found both relatively close by and in clear view. All I could think was that if I’d had my camera and long lens with me, that never would have happened.
My senses were back in tune, so I returned to the Pathfinder and considered the fork in my daily road. Was it time to pack up and run home to finish some work? Maybe I should pick up my fly rod and scout the river to better prepare for our return trip.
I picked up my fly rod.
Maybe it was the fresh territory, water warmed by more hours of hot sun, or the fish felt a little more active in the late afternoon, but the fishing was markedly improved over the morning.
The Neosho smallmouths, still wary, cycled through every style of fly I could offer. I could catch one smallmouth out of each hole. Just one. And not once did I get a second hit on the same fly presentation in the same hole. A few Kentucky spotted bass did help fill in the gaps.
In one hole, four different smallies came to the hook. I fished it on my way upstream, when I circled back after about a 20-minute break, and once on the way downstream at sunset.
A brown crawfish pattern with orange rubber legs fooled the first, a more realistic craw version took the second, on the last try, a gray crawfish worked, and finally, a real fighter shot in to beat out the biggest bass in the hole, plus two other chasers, to slam a small white and chartreuse clouser minnow.
Four smallies chased that minnow, and I played the one I caught upstream through some riffles to release it in another pool. You’d think I could let that hole rest for a minute and maybe get another run or two with that minnow. Nope. Not even a nibble or a follow. It was the loneliest minnow in all of Spring Creek.
I switched back to the gray crawfish, and an aggressive male redear sunfish shot out of the shadowed depths to inhale it as it began to sink. What a fighter! And on a fly that barely fit into its mouth!
Renowned angler and artist Dave Whitlock put the title “Southern Gentlemen” on the painting of his six favorite sunfishes, all males in their spawning colors. The longear is on top of that stack. Whitlock told me sunfishes on light fly tackle were what he started with and what would be among his favorites for life. That title always comes to mind when I handle these rugged little beauties.
The little gents with brilliant iridescent turquoise patterns, lines, and speckles ranging from orange to glowing red, with those handsome black, yellow-fringed “ears,” are quite the works of art. Underwater, in the sunlight, in low light, or in the mid-day sun, the colors seem to change on these living kaleidoscope color wheels.
But my eye still was on a large spotted bass hanging close to a brush pile, and what I hoped to lure in was that biggest smallie that showed himself when I dragged that little clouser across his territory. I sized up and tied on a double-barrel popper fly for one last go at sunset. It was the smallest of the double-barrels I own, but still just about the most voluminous fly my coachwhip-like custom 3-weight rod will handle.
I crouched out of sight of the water and remained as far away from the pool's edge as possible while still managing the distance with that kite-like fly on the ultralight line. A few false casts helped me manage it out there, and I dropped it in a patch of sunlight at the edge of the brush pile.
It plopped in, the line set softly, and I eased in a bit of slack as rings from the popper’s impact expanded and faded across the still, cold pool.
I tensed. When a spotted bass or smallmouth hit, I’d have to be quick on the hookset to keep them out of all that brush and an inevitable break off.
Slap! The surface strike broke the stillness of the evening; I set the hook and rose from my crouched position for the brawl with a “Yesss!”
I felt the truth in my hand first. A particular vibration in that now fully curled coachwhip first told the tale. Out of the shade and into the sunlight, that fish fought my pull, a glowing iridescent turquoise-and-red dart.
“How did you even get that in your mouth!” I laughed and thrilled at the skirmish in that feisty little sunfish that found a way to completely inhale a popper designed for fish five times its size.
I grabbed my phone to video the catch and, in my excitement, of course, I managed to double-tap the record button, on then off, as I was one-handed the gentleman warrior in toward shore and narrated that big popper and barbless hook curling out of his impossibly stretched maw as quickly as it apparently went in. I don’t think he was hooked so much; it was just that his mouth was so full he couldn’t spit the thing out and fight at the same time.
Dapper but tough as nails. What a fish.
Yessir, I know a youngster I’d like to introduce him to next time we come ‘round.