Previous to this year, I had only ever caught two positively identified silver redhorse. Last Tuesday I had the day off of work, and hit the same river in my previous post, "Fly fishing for suckers in Manitoba", where I mentioned having seen a few silvers. I started fishing this river a bit last year, and I've fished the reservoir below for many years, but didn't realize until recently that there were even silvers in the system.
When I arrived on Tuesday I was disappointed to see that all of the whites and shortheads had seemingly disappeared, but further downstream there were many dark pointed tails and convex dorsal fins cutting through the surface... silver redhorse! Most of them were spawning, but I saw enough holding in some of the deeper runs to know that I had a shot at catching a few.
I started off with the fly rod, but to no avail. The few feeding fish were in fast/deep water that was strewn with weed covered boulders. They weren't set up in the same easy-to-fish runs that the whites and shortheads had been. So I brought out the crawlers and was into fish right away and pretty consistently for a little under two hours until I ran out of bait. I caught eight silvers with six of those being 24 to 27 inches, along with two shortheads (I guess a few were still hanging around).
I won't get a chance to get back until Tuesday again, unless I were to miss the Iron Maiden concert tomorrow night (yeah right - at least the silvers come around once per year), so I'm crossing my fingers that they will still be around and maybe even willing to take a fly. Mostly I'm just happy to know that I have a river just an hour from home where I can actually target these fish now with the right timing.
The pictures aren't the greatest. It was raining and the fish were quite uncooperative. I don't normally use the self timer, and I am not yet set up with a tripod, so I did my best with what was around me while the fish were held in the water. Pictured are six different fish.
Favoured: 0
