If there’s one word (besides fun) I’ve come to associate with farm pond fishing over the years, it would have to be mysterious. Stripping a fly through an old country farm pond or an abandoned gravel pit is a bit like poking your fork into a seafood gumbo: you know you’re bound to come up with some kind of fish; exactly what kind is always something of a mystery, and just as often — surprising.
Many of us here in Colorado are fortunate to live where it’s possible to cast — within an hour of the urge — for trout, large, and smallmouth bass, sunfish, crappies, perch, catfish and a few exotic hybrids like tiger muskies, and wipers.
Obviously, it’s nice to have a hodge-podge of species to chase after, but the real charm in that kind of piscatorial potpourri lies in not knowing for certain which one of them might take your fly or lure. That nifty little element of surprise is one of the more seductive pleasures of fishing a farm pond.
A few years back, a friend invited me to fish a reclaimed gravel pit east of town with him. “Big smallies,” he told me, meaning smallmouth bass. “Jumbo-sized yellow perch and bluegills too,” he said, holding his hands up like so.
He wanted to target the bass, but I was drooling at the thought of batter-fried perch fillets. We both got more than we bargained for.
We launched his boat in a drizzling rain at about 8 a.m., switched on the little electric trolling motor and cruised silently to a weed choked bay where my friend had hooked some nice smallies the week before.
“They’re in here,” he told me, “But the place is lousy with yellow perch too, and they usually get to your lure before the bass do. They can be annoying.” Fine. They can annoy me all they want, I thought.
I’d rigged a light fly rod with a soft-hackled wet fly, but began probing first with a tiny tube jig on ultra-light spinning gear while he threw heavier jigs on a rod more suited to that task.
It didn’t take long. Within minutes we’d each hooked a half dozen perch, nice ones, but none of the really big ones my friend had bragged about.
I was giving him some grief about the dinks when something grabbed his jig and made for the bottom peeling line from his reel with considerably more authority than a perch — even a jumbo-sized one — was capable of.
A few minutes later he hauled a 16-inch largemouth bass into the boat. “Huh? There aren’t supposed to be any largemouths in here,” he said.
Surprise number one.
A few casts later he was into another heavyweight, this time a chunky-fat walleye we guessed at 2-to-3 pounds.
Surprise number two.
Next, I caught a tiny perch and a big smallmouth charged up out the weeds to eat it, and we landed him — surprise number three.
Before the day was over, we’d hooked large and smallmouth bass, walleyes, bluegills, and yellow perch and a couple of crappies.
Like I said; farm ponds are full of surprises.
Dennis Smith is a Loveland outdoors writer and photographer, and his freelance work is published nationally. Smith’s Home Waters column appears on the first and third Thursdays of the month. He can be reached at Dsmith7136@msn.com.
