Matching the "hatch"

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In today's fishing world dominated by bass tournaments on huge lakes, there are literally thousands of imitations of everything that bass feed on in lakes. But check the box of the typical stream fisherman and your lucky to find much more than a half dozen different lures and some of these are still more at home in still water. There are some inline spinners like the roostertail and minnow plugs like the rapala that do a good job of imitating the minnows and chubs that live in the streams pools and backwaters but that's about it. But the small fish that inhabit the riffles and runs of our smallmouth streams and rivers have been completely ignored, for often these look nothing like the silvery minnows of the backwaters. For instance in my home water, the Little Miami River there are no less than 13 different species of darters and five species of madtoms that live in it's riffles. All these little fish use strong pectoral fins to hold their place among the rocks in the swift current. When viewed from above (like a foraging smallmouth looking for food) these fins are a very noticeable feature of most darters and madtoms.
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These little fish seemingly come in an endless variety of colors ranging from quite dull to brighter than any aquarium fish. Many darter species change color also during breeding season to attract a mate. I've tried to come up with a few simple ways to imitate these little known but important members of the food chain.
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Using acrylic paints, leadheaded jigs can be painted to give you a wide variety of color schemes to try during the days fishing. A coat of clear fingernail polish protects the paint from chipping on the rocky stream bottom. A round ball jig best imitates madtoms and pointier types more closely resemble most darter species. Having a few of both types in a variety of colors gives you more options to experiment with on the water.
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Then take a grub or plastic worm and cut a triangle out of the tail with scissors. This triangle is threaded on the jighead ahead of another grub to represent the prominent pectoral fins of your darter or madtom. Often there are a few species on every riffle with pectoral fins that are brightly tinged with color and using a triangle cut out of a grub that contrasts in color with the grub used for the body of the jig can make a big difference.
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As there are often multiple species of darters and madtoms on the riffle togethor, the smallmouth are used to feeding on a wide variety of colors. I carry several different colors of triangles already cut out in my tackle box as well as a variety of different colored grubs. By mixing and matching different triangles with different grub bodies you can experiment around to find the combination that works best on any given day.
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The main constants are size and the prominent pectoral fins. I almost always fish a three inch grub on an eighth ounce jighead and just vary colors.

Darters and madtoms spend almost their entire lives among the rocks of a stream's riffles and runs, the same places smallmouths move into to feed. Fish your imitation along the bottom in short quick motions or let it sweep along the bottom in the current, as these little fish do not swim up high in the water column or in schools, but as the name implies dart from rock to rock. These little guys are almost never caught in traditional minnow traps but are only seen by using a seine right among the rocks of the riffle.

Another resident you will seine out of these riffles, and a main reason smallmouth move in to feed, is the crayfish. While there are some great crayfish imitations out there such as the jig and pig, these are mostly just simply too big to imitate the small crayfish that stream smallmouth love.
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A modified double-tailed grub makes one of the best imitations of these little craws I know of. I first use the jig head like a crochet needle to pull living rubber through the grubs body to make legs. I then trim these to length with scissors.
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Just like darters, crayfish can vary wildly in color and it pays to have different combinations of bodies and legs. Sometime a bit of bright orange or red living rubber can be key in triggering smallmouth when they are in a picky mood. Finding out more about the things that smallmouth feed on in your stream and adding baits that imitate them can add new dimensions to your stream fishing arsenal.
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A pocket full of fun...

I often can't sleep at night, a product of years spent working the late shift I guess. I'll turn on the Outdoor Channel and watch those guys dressed like Nascar drivers fishing exotic locations with $30,000 bass boats loaded down with more gear than my father's old bait shop had stocked on the shelves. And that kind of fishing is fun, I admit it. I have hundreds of lures and thousands of flies and dozens of rod and reel combos and have been known to head out looking like I'm heading down the Congo for a month instead of fishing the Little Miami for a couple hours. But do you really need all that junk to have a quality fishing trip? Of course not. You can have a great trip, possibly the best trip of the year and fit everything you need in a shirt pocket. You really only need three or four basic pieces of terminal tackle to catch fish almost every single time you fish a river like the Little Miami. First off get a pack or two of baitholder hooks in size two or four. You can substitute a similar sized hook of another style but baitholders are available almost everywhere and work great. You might want to add a pack of treble hooks in size eight too. Next get a pack of barrel swivels or two and some egg sinkers and your set. Rigging is simplicity itself. The egg sinker is slid onto the line and a barrel swivel is tied into the line about a foot down from the hook. This is idealy fished on a medium spinning outfit and six or eight pound test line. The rig is then tossed out, the rod set in a forked stick and a pebble from the riverbank placed on the line so you can leave the bail open without the line being carried away by the current. More than the tackle the key to catching at least some fish every trip depends on location. Where you want to set up is in a well defined hole just below a nice riffle. Right where the current first begins to slow. If there is an eddy and a deep pocket even better. Too many people fishing bait in the river just set up in the middle of a long slow hole away from the riffle, cover, or the main current. Most of the time this is a recipe for catching little or nothing. Thread on a nightcrawler and fish below a good riffle and you might catch just about anything in the river from all the catfish species, to the occasional bass or carp. In addition nowdays you are just about guaranteed to catch a drum or two (or ten). Any time the water temperature rises above the upper fifties a nightcrawler on light line just about guarantees some drum. Switch to minnows and you might just catch a nice sauger, white bass, or flathead. Baiting up with crayfish in the two or three inch range can also catch just about anything that swims. Change the baitholder out with the treble hook and bait up with a doughball made of wheaties and hamburger and your set for channel cats and carp. Trust me catching a half dozen five or six pound carp on light spinning tackle will change the way you look at these guys forever.
I must admit my favorite way to fish the river is wading the river casting for smallmouth bass with lures but even on these trips I often throw a dozen nightcrawlers in the daypack. About midday I'm ready for a break and stop at a nice riffle and throw this rig out while I eat a sandwich. It's amazing just how often this "break" produces the most memorable fish of the day...

Magrish River Lands Preserve

If your roaring across the Little Miami on Kellogg Avenue and see the sign for Salem Road take it. Down around the looping exit ramp and you turn into the Magrish River Lands Preserve, less than a minute away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. Magrish itself is only a 45-acre park but it butts up against California Woods on one side and the opposite river bank belongs the best I can tell to Lunken Airport. The river flows under the Kellogg Avenue bridge and out to the Ohio River. Here sits a giant marina busy with boat traffic from the giant Ohio River but upstream of that sits Magrish and quiet, quiet, quiet. Well almost, just when you think your way upstream somewhere away from the big city here comes a plane from nearby Lunken Airport buzzing overhead. The airport makes up for that though (almost) by helping keep Magrish a little bit isolated and off the beaten path. You might share the place with a lone birdwatcher but your just as likely, during the week at least, to have the place completely to yourself. And there's somehow alot of empty space to have completely to yourself, for a long ways upstream there is nothing in the floodplain even though your in the city. Up river a bit towards state route 125 I caught the largest fish I've ever caught out of the Little Miami, a huge carp I guesstimated at somewhere between thirty five and forty pounds. People that live here and fish the river daily tell me that the fish seem to wander in and out of the Ohio. This makes for quite a bit of mystery, one day the river here is full of fish, the next seemingly empty. But this also makes for a great diversity of fish too with white bass schooling one day and something different like hybrid stripers the next.
The history of this place is really the history of Cincinnati itself for the cities original settler, Benjamin Stites, settled here on 20,000 acres. Stites owned the riverbank from the rivers mouth to upstream of present day Lynken Airport. Benjamin Stites was a trader who seemed to buy and sell a bit of everything when a band of Shawnee stole his horses and some goods near Washington, Kentucky. A party set off to try and recover them and followed the Shawnee across the Ohio and up the Little Miami. Supposedly Stites was so taken by the beauty of the Little Miami river valley that he decided then and there that he would someday settle here. He helped persuade John Cleves Symmes, a New Jersey congressman to purchase territory between the Miamis from the federal government, divide it into parcels, and sell the land to settlers such as himself. In 1787, Symmes contracted with the United States Treasury Board to buy one million acres of the region. Symmes’s first buyer was, of course, Stites. And the rest, as they say, is history. Being subject to floods of both the Ohio and Little Miami rivers has kept this little island of peace possible as the great city of Cincinnati has grown up all around it.

Armleder Park

Over the hill from Ault Park and just off route 125 and east of downtown is another jewel in the Hamilton county park system, Otto Armleder Memorial Park. Over three hundred acres of soccer fields, dog parks,and rollerblading trails hide the fact that the whole backside of the park straddles the Little Miami River. And not just any stretch of river but a very interesting one containing a number of bends, riffles, and the biggest rock bars on the river. Unfortunately the proximity of the dogpark means there seems to always be a labrador retriever splashing up and down the riverbank. But get there early in the morning before people come pouring into the park and enjoy some of the best fishing in the whole river for that piscatorial dinosaur, the gar. Armleders extensive shallows with a rock instead of muddy bottom are prime territory to catch one of these scary monsters. That long bony bill filled with sharp teeth makes gar very hard to hook with conventional techniques. I use medium spinning tackle and cut bait. The trick is to cut the bait into a one inch square and use a small hook. Use just enough weight to keep the bait in place or even none if possible. The bait is cast out and the bail left open and the line secured by a tiny rock so the gar can pick up the bait and run with it. Typically the fish will take off on a lightning fast run and you need to wait. And wait, and wait, its allmost impossible to wait too long to strike when gar fishing. You want the fish to swallow the bait as its nearly impossible to land one otherwise.
They are strong and able fighters and I've had them jump completely out of the water during the battle. By the way don't use a stainless steel hook as you are just going to cut the line to release the fish. The enzymes inside the gars stomach will disolve the hook rather quickly. Allmost any fish you catch of whatever species that is hooked deeply has a much much higher chance of surviving if you cut the line than try to rip the hook out. Armleder has some wide very shallow stretches that are not great fish holding spots but the bends have some places that hold all the major fish species in the river. Theres also a very nice little known canoe launch that will let you explore more of the river too. The huge gravel and rock bars make Armleder a super destination spot in the spring and late summer when wading birds are migrating thru. Theres a nice shaded trail that follows the riverbank that allmost lets you think you are in wilder country too that offers fine river views to the fisherman or birder.

Stubbs Mill and Halls Creek

From the road the bridge looks new and modern but if you follow the faint path alongside the bridge to underneath you find the big support columns holding up the bridge are layed up out of old stones from the river and the bridge is very very old.
Under the bridge it is often possible to have a nice little fishing trip if you only have a spare hour just by fishing right here. Here at the bridge there is a good riffle and behind each column the river has dug out a nice eddy. A few years ago a friend of mine caught a nice three and half pound smallie here on a small rapala before I even got a lure tied on. Between the first column and the bank is some slow water that never fails to give up some pumpkinseeds to my flyrod, in my mind the prettiest fish that swims.
Its appropriate that Stubb's Mill road crosses the river here on such an old bridge for the road is named after the mill built on the river here in 1802 and ran by Zimri Stubbs. The old stones of the bridge create a perfect nesting spot for swallows and they put on quite a show in early summer as they raise their young. The sleek swallows remind me of fighter planes as they swoop up and down the river catching bugs.
At the time Zimri ran the mill here, this section of river was part of Mount's Station. Mount's Station was a huge block of land granted to William Mounts as part of the Virgina Military District. The Virginia Military District was created between the two Miami rivers to reward soldiers with land grants who had served in the revolutionary war.
Downstream of the bridge river road closely follows the river two miles downstream to South Lebanon. In the last few years this section of road has experienced the odd
phenomenon of "eagle jams" as cars stop to look at a bald eagle perching in the trees above the river. This is probably the best section of the entire Little Miami to see an eagle from the car as they are frequently seen here.
Above the riffle at the bridge is a long run leading up to a fine riffle to fish. Here on each side of the river are the first of the several gravel pits that line the river between here and the town of Morrow. On the right bank looking upstream the big sycamores are filled with huge nests of a great blue heron rookery. Their cries fill the air in late spring and early summer as the great birds come and go from their nests.
I'm allways filled with sadness when fishing here, knowing what amazing history was destroyed by these gravel pits. For here on the banks overlooking the river once stood a great serpent mound 1300 feet long built by the Fort Ancient Indians. This great mound was destroyed by the digging of the gravel pits. Just behind the pits stands the new high school which was also built on the site of the Stubbs Earthworks, a large ceremonial center for the Hopewell Indians. This was also the site of "Woodhenge", a huge circle 240 feet in diameter that was outlined by hundreds of huge posts made out of tree trunks by the indians. A small creek named Bigfoot Run winds around the pits and across the school property before entering the hills. Here I have found reduction flakes from arrowhead making in the water of the creek.
On the ridge overlooking Stubb's Mills is a new subdivision. Luckily the builders of the subdivision let the experts examine the area after uncovering numerous relics.
It was discovered a large indian town once stood here. In the soil was found millions of reduction flakes made by flintknapping. Some of these flakes were from stones as far away as Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and even obsidian from Wyoming! I've read a theory that the Indians completely changed the surrounding woods here. Girdling unwanted trees with stone axes and keeping the undergrowth down with periodic fires, till the woods was full of just nut and mast bearing trees for food and the undergrowth all new growth that would attract game like deer. This whole section of river in prehistoric time must have actually seemed quite settled with open fields for growing corn, mounds and earthworks, houses and open parklike woods. I imagine the first settlers at Mount's Station must have turned over relics like bits of pottery with every furrow they plowed.
Above here the river is a long deep pool stretching for half a mile to the riffles below the mouth of Hall's Creek. I often imagine indians paddling canoes or swimming in the languid waters of this big pool next to their village. Around any wood in this pool is a good place to try for crappies and sunfish. I have encountered a few kentucky spotted bass here but not enough to come up with any sort of pattern.
At the head of this big pool begin the riffles of Hall's Creek. Hall's Creek enters the river from the left as you wade upstream amidst an outstanding series of riffles and runs in the river. This is one of those sections of river where you might expect to catch four or five different species of fish in a morning using something like a small hair jig or plastic grub. Right at the mouth of Hall's Creek the river makes a sharp turn and has dug a deep hole known locally as the whirlhole. Along the outside bend the current has eaten away at the bank forming a large cliff that swallows nest in.
Opposite the cliff in early spring marsh marigolds carpet the river bottom completely in yellow. One morning while walking down to the river I walked up on a young doe standing among the flowers, beams of sunlight streaming the sycamores. It was one of those perfect small momments you never forget.
The whirlhole often yields nice catfish. I'll never forget the big channel cat I caught here on a grub that had me thinking for a minute I'd hooked a record smallmouth. Softcraws or nightcrawlers can be very productive fished here. And the run leading down to the whirlhole often yields a nice bass or two to a jig sweeping down with the current.
Often while fishing here I'll search the rockbars thrown up by the river and up Hall's Creek itself for fossils. The whole of the Little Miami watershed is rich in fossils but a few years ago a cloudburst was centered here that dropped eight inches of rain in a few hours. This caused Hall's Creek and the other nearby creeks to blow out and exposed tons and tons of rock rich in fossils.
Actually the entire Little Miami watershed including tributaries like Todd's Fork and Ceasers Creek and Hall's Creek were cut by an even greater flood, the melting of the great glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The torrents of meltwater cut the steep valleys and layed down the gravel beds mined all along the river.
As the water cut the valleys of the Little Miami drainage it exposed the layers of rock formed in the Ordovician Age, about 500 million years ago. Then a great shallow sea covered this area and now I often find the fossils of cephalopods here at Halls Creek. Cephalopods were squidlike creatures that thrived in the ancient sea. Some types of cephalopods were the largest animals of the Orodovician world. Fossils have been found measuring over thirty feet in length and even ones of seven feet have been found close to here. Most fossils of cephalopods I find along the river are one to three inch sections of their segmented shells, but here at Halls Creek after the big storm I found a complete shell of a small cephalopod allmost eight inches in length. Trilobites, bryozoans, and brachiopods are also found in the rocks of the river valley.
My wife once remarked that while doing laundry she never had to look for other women's phone numbers and the like in my pockets but instead had to watch out for wierd things like rocks or pieces of bone. It seems I'm constantly picking up something while bumming around the river.
Here at Hall's Creek I've come a mile upstrean from Stubb's Mill and usually get out of the river here and hike back down the road to my truck at the old bridge. After all encountering Heron rookeries, Indian mounds, old pioneers, great floods and fossilized sea monsters along with occasional smallmouth bass makes for a pretty full morning.








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Morrow and Todd's Fork

"wait without hope,for hope would be hope for the wrong thing"
....T.S.Eliot


Morrow is an excellent place to start a fishing trip. I've started several trips by enjoying an ice cream cone standing on "the point", downtown at the mouth of Todd's Fork looking over the Little Miami and the Fork deciding where to spend the day casting for smallmouth. Unfortunately Morrow is a better place to base a fishing trip than to actually live at anymore. The ice cream parlor is just about the only building not boarded up or run down in the downtown. The wide street that holds the beautiful old train depot is usually empty except for a few pretty young moms forlornly pushing rickety old strollers or maybe an old man sitting on a bucket out on the point fishing. Other river towns such as South Lebanon or Waynesville are practically booming in comparison.
Although I've never seen it, local fishing lore has a nice musky caught right here at the mouth of Todd's Fork every few years. I do know that in winter on a warm day you have a chance to catch some nice saugers here. The biggest saugers I've taken in the river have been caught here. A plastic grub on a jig head or a minnow are the first choice for sauger in the river. Sauger have the odd habit of actually liking some resistance when biting and using a much heavier jig head or sinker than you would use for any other fish can sometimes up your success rate.
If you ever find yourself out on the point looking out on the river turn and look just up Todd's Fork at the old railroad bridge. Twice I've seen the river pouring over this bridge in floods. Now turn and look directly across the little miami at the river bottoms on the far bank. If you follow a line in your mind level with the old railroad bridge you can see why the town of Fredericksburg is no longer there, just a few run down old houses including the one that held Cook's bait shop when I was a kid. But before there was even a town of Morrow, Fredericksburg was founded on the far bank just after 1800. Giant floods such as the 1913 flood would cover anything there to the rooftops. Just upstream before you get the 123 bridge across the river the site of the first bridge across the little miami was built here in 1818.
Morrow itself didn't really come into existance as a town until the tracks of the Little Miami River Railroad Company reached here in 1844. After that Morrow boomed along with the railroad then died along with the railroad. The town itself was named after railroad president Jeremiah Morrow, the two time governor of Ohio who was Warren Counties most famous citizen. Morrow was friends with Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Morrow was a jumping off point for sportmen riding the train out of Cincinnati to fish the Little Miami. My own father worked for the railroad on a section gang out of the Morrow depot that was responsible for the track from Morrow downstream to Fosters. Just upstream of the 123 bridge is the ruins of an old dam and millrace that I think may have belonged to one of Morrows most famous characters, William Smalley. Smalley was captured twice as a young man by indians, once for five years,and served as a guide and translator for almost every indian campaign of the period. Records of General St. Clair's campaign along the Little Miami show Smalley as shooting 21 indians in battle. He also served General Mad Anthony Wayne as a translator at the signing of the treaty of Greenville. William Smalley guided and hunted for the surveying party of Col. William Lytle and was paid seventy five cents a day. Lytle later sold Smalley 600 acres nine miles up Todd's Fork for $200 that he sold after building a house and another grist mill and sawmill on for $5265 in 1833. Smalley was infamous for his odd appearance owing to his indian captors slicing the rims of his ears away from the rest, these hung down off his ears askew for the rest of his life.
A small island splits the river here at the ruins of the old mill, creating a series of riffles. Redworms fished on tiny hooks produce big catches of suckers as they move up on the riffles in early spring. Snaring suckers off the riffle was done alot here in the past also. I've caught several nice smallmouth here fishing a roostertail in the smooth fast water as the river gathers itself in the tail of the big pool above before pouring over these riffles. Some years, depending upon how the river has dug out or filled in the hole over the winter,the eddy below the island can produce catfish on chicken livers pitched in and allowed to drift around the eddy on unweighted hooks.
Right above the riffles and ballfields on the edge of town stands a mighty sycamore but if you walk a few hundred feet further upstream is a true giant, a behemoth that must have been growing here long before the town when mountain lions (called "painters" by early pioneers)and wolves roamed the riverbank.Old records show there was a bounty paid for both in early Warren County history. In William Smalley's time there was also a bounty paid for indian scalps for a few years during the indian wars. The bounties varied from $96 to $135 dollars, enough money to buy land for a small farm. Here around this giant tree is an ideal spot to catch a big carp on a doughball or crappies in any brush you can find in this big pool.
The woods alomg the river here has a few albino squirrels I've seen while walking the bike path that follows the old railbed along the river. The hills then rise sharply and a few small trickles form tiny waterfalls as they fall off the steep bank into the river. If you can pick your way down the steep bank without breaking your neck the mouths of these mini streams form tiny rockbars just big enough for aa adventuresome angler to rest while catching some channel cats. The woods here is especially lovely in spring as it is covered in wildflowers with dutchmen's breeches and trilliums putting on quite a show. In this same time of year the gobbles of wild turkeys also often fill these woods.
Going back to Morrow and heading up Todd's Fork opens up miles of some of the best smallmouth fishing in the state to a wading angler. During summer weekends when canoes fill the river the relative quiet of Todd's Fork can be a welcome escape.
A book could be written on fishing this wonderful stream alone. Just out of Morrow,First Creek joins Todd's Fork almost within sight of town. This delightful little stream has several lovely waterfalls and was followed by the Shawnee who captured Daniel Boone as they took him to villages in Ohio fron Kentucky.







The giant sycamore pictured is in downtown Morrow. It was hard to get an exact measurement because of the vine growing up one side but at five feet off the ground it's somewhere around twenty four feet around!