JD, fish...anyone else. last night when MJ and me were fishing Powell we were noticing the hundreds of thousands of 5 foot grampuses flying everywhere and got to talking about them. crap i didnt even know they had wings, the only place ive ever seen them is as larva in creeks under rocks. my pap used to say they were pretty good smallie bait. MJ was telling me that hed heard that when they get wings that smallies wouldnt eat them anymore. yall ever fished with them any?

No I haven't , but now you have go me thinking

fish....now you got me thinking too...thinking you should try to make some flies that look like them!

hang on ill find a picture of what one looks like with wings. they are seriously about 4-6 inches long.

these things were EVERYWHERE last night. and we heard a few smallies breaking top water last night....and both got to wondering if thats what the were hitting. good possibility i think...

Sounds good I also went to bass pro in cinci yesterday and picked up some material, they had those propellers that I needed to make the torpedo. If you can take some pictures of one of those baits( side view and top view) and I'll give it a try, thanks.

I'll try to come up with something on those. the wings look like the biggest challenge.

BCO do you think that this may fool a smallie or two. I'm going to try it this weekend if I get a chance.

looks dang good fish! heck if i was a smallie thatd catch my butt for sure.

i just went and spent about 30 bucks in plastic baits for river smallie fishing....mini flukes, dingers, crawlers, yum crawdads, and tubes. let me know how that fly works...id be willing to bet those smallies will be tearin that thing up!

I watched a guy yesterday at the bass pro shop spend at least $300 at once just on lures . MY wife looked at me and said don't even think about it. Ah well a man can dream can't he.

crap my old lady would kill me if she found out i spent 30 bucks on them today. if it wasnt payday i wouldnt have done it, but every pay day (2 weeks) i let myself get some lures.

Thats one of the reasons that I tie my own I spent about $40 for supplies yesterday I'll probably get a 150 flies and poppers out of it.

BCO is there any campgrounds near where you fish on the powell or even in the area.I'm thinking of trying to talk JD into coming down that way say the first of August and spend a couple of days. Maybe if you just have a little time you could point us in the right direction and we will give it a try. but if you have some time you can show us around and do some fishing. If JD can't come I may just come myself.

Thats the adult stage of a hellgramite,..or at that stage its called a dobsonfly.

If you had that many flying around the river,..that is DEFINITELY A CLEAN RIVER. They are a good indicator of water quality

I don't know if you notice or not when we were fishing the past couple weekends I keep turning over rocks in some of the shoals looking for them in the hellgramite stage.

The small steam where I was rasied as a boy had them at that time,..now its so polluted by coal mine & gas well run off/discharge hardly a minnow can be found.

A good way to find if your steam has them,..is to turn your porch light on at dark this time of year. They are attacted to the light and will be found on the wall near the light after dark.

The one in the photo BCO posted is a female,..the males have longer mandibles for holding the females during mating.

Oh !!,..was working this evening about and hour before dark here comes Matt. He had the open face and my fly rod, so we took off to the river. Matt caught a couple small large mouths on a white rooster tail.

I only had a white popper on the rod from last weekend,..I didn't catch anything ,..but did get to cast a few times. Man the river is really pretty, the fog was setting in at dark when we left. Beautiful site to see

Thanks for the info JD I'm going to try to tie a close similarity to it if I can. Sounds like you had fun at the river, I love that time of evening just before dark.

theres a few spots you can camp on powell. yall set a date and well go fishing.

sounds good to me , I'll be ready for a little trip probably in july ,after I get some work done around here.

sounds good to me man. you get to fish any this weekend?

I fished the north all day yesterday,I'm beginning to get a little concerned I caught one dink. You know how you see dinks swimmimg in the shallows(usually they are everywhere) I saw three. I thought that maybe they just werent' biting on the flyrod, so I tried traditional. threw a rebel craw,rapala, wormed , bettle spin nothing ,even tried nightcrawler(old faithful ) NOTHING. I'm beginning to think that something has drasticlly changed since last year(this time last year I had caught at least 50 nice smallies, this year two. Jd and I went to Redbird last weekend and even though they didn't bite to well, you could see them swimming everywhere.I just don't know what has happened,I'm just hoping that I'm wrong .

weird man, really weird. i can say ive not caught as many this year, but on average have caught better fish. this drought may be messing with them a little. i know powell is super low right now, im gonna have to find some deeper water. in most spots its not even up to my knees.