Fishing at DaHole...

Yesterday, I spent the day down at DaHole in Bliss… This is where I was catching most of my large fish last year. It is a large deep hole in the river with a set of wide and shallow rapids on the back end of it.

There is now a roving herd of sheep that are now cruising the area. The only good news about that is that they are sorta smoothing out the road ruts and I cannot smell…

Again, I didn’t get any fish hooked up. I am really getting frustrated with it all. But, again, I saw some very large fish jump/surface. I saw probably the largest ever – it did a surface thing which got my peripheral eye attention and made a splashing noise I heard over the constant drone of the rapids. I then focused on it and saw it rolling back into the water and saw the dorsal fin with part of the body through the tail – sorta like you see with a whale in the ocean. It was a VERY large fish. It happened in the mainstream of the water flow, across the hole from where I fish – which is where they mostly jump/surface at. I would guess the dorsal was close to a foot high and the body directly underneath it was about as thick and there was probably a good 2’ and maybe 3’ to the tail fin from there – enough for the dorsal to be fully submerged when the tail fin came up. It was MUCH larger than the 8’er I caught last year. I would estimate the back section was at least twice as large, which, I think, would put it easily in the 10’ to 12’, 400#+, class - Think of a 12' shark and you can get the idea of what I am talking about.

Afterwards, I was sitting there pondering the event and looking at my lines, hoping one of them would take a dive with the fish. Which didn’t happen, but then my thoughts turned to that scene in Jaws, where the guy first saw the shark come up and in a shocked and stunned manner told the captain that they needed a bigger boat… I have been spooled twice, but never saw the fish before. That large one I saw gives me a whole new understanding of the ‘challenge’ at hand. I am thinking I need to rethink this whole level of line and tackle I am using…

With the fight the 6’ through 8’ers put up, a fish that size would not be stoppable if it decided to go through the rapids and downstream, or anywhere it wanted to go for that matter. I have never had one pass the rapids yet, which is one of the real features of DaHole, but they have to go through them, as they do go up and down the river… I think when they are hooked, they just aren’t ‘focused’ enough to pass them or something…

Anyway, the air and water are getting a lot warmer and real soon they will be feeding after a long cold winter and it should be BIG fun here in DaHo…