Finally got out to the swamp this afternoon to do a little fishing. While waiting for my father in law to arrive, I started fishing in the pond by the house. I was fishing a 1.5# red and white tube bait on a 4.5' ultra lite spinning rig. I caught 6 bream on 6 casts - 4 of them keepers. I rigged up my fly rod and caught another nice one on a foam spider. I then switched to the .22 to take care of the turtles that had taken an interest in my stringer. My father in law arrived, and as he got rigged up with spinning rod and bream buster and we headed into the swamp to try to catch a few redbreast.

We slipped down to the creek and started fishing. I hooked one redbreast on the foam spider. I made a few more casts with the fly rod, but after no action, I switched to the red/white tube. I quickly hooked up with another redbreast. I kept fishing up and down the creek and hooked a few small stumpknockers, but nothing worth keeping. I met back up with my FIL and we fished on up the creek. He'd kept 4 stumpknockers and thrown back 3 or 4 female redbreast. I hooked a couple more females (which we returned to the creek) and we moved upstream again. We call the hole we were fishing in "the redbreast hole" because it is usually full of them, but the water is especially low on our end of the swamp for this time of year, which is the only thing we can figure for the lack of fish. Anyway, we moved upstream again to "the duck boxes".

The low water made it easy to get close to the creek away from lots of trees, so I was able to catch probably 6 more small fish (none keepers) including one 7 inch largemouth bass using a #10 hare's ear nymph. My father in law said "Well, this is a first. You are the first member of this family to catch a largemouth bass on a fly rod in the Four Hole Swamp!" It's probably true.


As we weren't catching anything worth keeping, we decided to head back up to the pond to catch enough to make "a mess". We slipped the boat into the pond and gave it hell. We fished for probably 45 minutes. I caught 3 more bream and one small bass on the spinning rod and tube bait. We called it quits and headed to the barn to clean fish. The results: 4 stumpknockers, 2 redbreast, and 8 bluegill.