Strange Fishing Challenge. Day Two.

 The ongoing saga of my attempt to catch 20 species of fish in seven days of angling.

Day Two

I had not planned on fishing on a Sunday.  I like tranquility when I fish.  But it turned out to be a very nice day and I figured that given the places on my list for the day, crowds were unlikely to be an issue.

The agenda for the day was the Yellow River and its tributaries.  Why?  No particular reason other than that streams of various sizes have unusual fish, and that I had a geocache or two up that way to look into.  And so we're off...

Drywood Creek

You won't come close to 20 species without targeting various bottom feeding suckers.  And also the many glorified minnows that are out there.  I'd never fished this stream but had heard it had promise.  

I liked the crumbling bridge abutment.  There were also some old hunks of rusty bridge parts in the water.  When you are on the hunt for unloved species of fish these hillbilly flourishes are appreciated.

Here's what lives there.  The Common Shiner.

And... our old friend the Creek Chub.

From my experiences at Chub Fests I am a proficient minnow angler, so this was in my wheelhouse.  I also nabbed a couple of other smaller specimens that I had hoped were something else, but my consultant decided that they were just immature versions and color variants.  Still, not a bad morning.

For the afternoon expedition I fished several locations along the Yellow River with a quick stop at another tributary creek.  Hey, it had a new culvert!  No chub fisherman can pass those up.  Some were at places with rapids and pools, others at quiet spots.  The plan was to put one bait on the bottom with a big pole capable of handling carp and so forth, while using the light tackle to target other species.  Some locations had established hobo fishing spots.

The afternoon portion of the program was less successful.  Oh I caught fish.  Quite a few in fact.  But so many repeats of species I already had.  Chub after chub.  And when I put a hook full of worms on the bottom to try and entice bottom feeders it kept getting hit by a parade of hungry small mouth bass.  So...no additional species.  And a distressing amount of lost tackle.  There's a lot of logs and such on the bottoms of creeks and rivers.

Lessons learned:

This is not going to be easy.

I will probably have to fish at inconvenient times of day.

Forgetting my polarized sunglasses was not helpful.

Small mouth bass will attack anything.

Species tally:  2. Runny tally 5.

Enjoyment factor:  Let's see.  Plenty of fish caught but insufficient progress on my goal.  Lots of scratches and bug bites.  On the plus side, although I saw a bit of poison ivy I am as of this writing 24 hours out and seem to have avoided trouble.  Also, there were frogs.  Many frogs.  More frogs than I've seen since I was about the age of my amphibian obsessed grandson.  He'd of loved it.  So....7.5/10 on the day.

Re-equipping and planning for the next stage.  As I am not doing this on successive days my next report could be down stream a bit.