It was 13 degrees this morning when I left home with a couple spinning rods and a pair of waders to stuffed in the back seat of my pick-up. You need to breath carefully when its this cold outside or your nostrils will freeze shut, a lesson I relearned this morning….and it served as a reminder that is clearly obsurd to go bass fishing on a day like this.
Yet, I wasn’t without a well-layed plan. There’s a stretch of river maybe 40 miles north of town that is warmed by a nuclear not only does this keep the ice at bay, it keeps fish like bass active, providing a great alternative to ice fishing. Better yet, my partner Greg Huff who ran the NAFC Facebook site, knows this fishery well, having spent many a winter day there.
We parked near the first stretch we planned to fish, and I notived right away that we weren’t alone. There was a group of three fishing some slack water downstream from us, and a guy in a bright yellow jacket a couple hundred yards upstream throwing a fly rod.
Greg gave a temperature reading as soon as we reached the water; ”41 degrees, the same as it was when I was here last week, ” he said. Greg was rigged and ready, so he immediately waded and began casting a tube to the inside edge of a current seem. “There’s one,” he grunted, before I’d even selected which tube I was going to throw. The fish was beautifully-colored smallie, a deep brown and maybe 16 inches long, that sported bright red eyes and the power to pull drag.
Greg let me know the fish came on a 3-inch green pumkin Berkley PowerTube fished on a 3/16-th ounce jighead. As I watched, he flipped the tube slightly upstream and allow it to sweep downstream with the current. The bites, he said, are typically subtle, but every once in a while a bass with blast the tube.
The river was much clearer than I expected, so I tied a leader of mono to my Nanofil base before casting. I didn’t have a 3/16th head so I went with a 1/4-ouncer and I paid for the decision to go heavier. Greg land 5 fish to every one of mine, a credit to his knowledge of the fishery and how to mine it. The fish wanted a specific drift and it took me awhile to get things right.
We eventually moved upstream about a mile. Here, there was a lot more ice floating in the river, but the water itself was a full 6 degrees warmer than the first stretch we fished thanks to our closer proximity to the power plant. The fish here were a lot more active, too. One fish I hooked jumped multiples times before I could grab his lower lip!
There are warm-water discharges found across the country and many of them create unique fisheries. I recommend you check on the opportunities that exist in you back yard. We landed 14 bass in a short few hours today. That’s good fishing anything of year, but especially heart-warming in February!—Steve
