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| La Buena Vida Please be sure to wipe your feet |
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Monday, December 04, 2006
Update 1/3/07: It's official...I got the certificates back from TPWD, the striper I caught recently has been certified as a new state fly rod record. Guadalupe Striper  Several people have asked for a more detailed story of this fish, so here goes. If you don't know, I’m John Erskine and I’ve lived in Austin for about 12 years. I’ve been fishing off and on all of my life, and have been a very avid fly fisherman for about 10 years. It is a pretty consuming passion, so I’ve done a lot of fishing in that time. I really enjoy fishing for a variety of species, in a variety of conditions, and I love to travel. In Texas I fish mostly for warm water species, and especially love trying to catch carp on a fly. I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity fish all over the world from northern Norway to Patagonia and for a wide variety of species. Like most people I have other passions in addition to fishing, like climbing and mountaineering, and lately I am toying with canoe and kayak racing as well. When I’m not fishing I work in senior management for a Korean video game publisher, and invest in real estate. I’ve been in the GRTU chapter for about 8 years, and joined in order to get access to the lease program. On December 2nd I went fishing with my friends Shea McClanahan and Alan Weinberger on the Guadalupe below the fourth crossing. I’ve heard about the stripers in the Guadalupe since the major flood a few years ago, and have talked about fishing for them for some time. I’ve never caught a striper before, but have always wanted to! I have been trout fishing a lot this year already, so I brought an 8 weight and some big streamers with me this trip with the intention of catching a striper. We fished above the weir for a while in the morning and caught some very nice rainbows. The fish were rising to the surface, and I caught 8-10 on dries! Super fun! After a while, I decided to rig up the 8 weight and fish the deep holes below the weir where the stripers are said to hang out. I was fishing an Temple Fork 8 wt TiCr rod with a bead head black and yellow bunny bugger with a Teeny T200 sinking line. Serious ‘dredgeomatic’ technique. I was making long shooting casts down and across in the slower deeper holes and got hung up several times on the bottom. I saw some shadowy shapes moving deep at the tail end of the run. I figured they were carp as I caught a big one out of this same hole a week earlier. I made a long cast in that direction, let the fly sink, started a fast strip and for a split second I thought I was hung up again. However, the big toilet flush in the middle of the river let me know something else was going on. The fish ran a very long ways into my backing, in fact I was worried about running out of backing a couple of times. He stayed very deep, and for a while I wasn’t sure what I even had on the line. I feared that I had foul hooked a big carp because of the way this fish went to the bottom and stayed there. He was so far away, and in deep water, that we didn’t get a good look at him for about 10 minutes. When I finally got the fish close enough to us, and close enough to the surface, there was a moment where his huge gray striped tail came up out of the water in slow motion, and my heart skipped a few beats… He took about 20 minutes to land on 14 pound tippet and put up quite a fight. Thanks to my friend Shea for helping me land him, without his help it would have taken much longer to finish the job. Turns out this is now a pending state fly rod record striper caught from the Guadalupe River 12-2-06. Thanks to Shea and Alan for helping me figure out how to properly weigh and record the fish, I didn’t know anything about the process before this experience. The previous state record was 22 pounds for a striper on a fly rod. This fish was measured on a certified scale at 36.65 pounds, 43 inches long, and 26 inches in girth. Normally I release my fish, but I decided to keep this one to apply for the state record, and the Guadalupe trout fishermen will be happy that he isn't eating trout out of this hole any more. So far this is the biggest fish I have landed on a fly rod. I’ve hooked bigger tarpon, but not landed them. Until this fish, the biggest freshwater fish I have landed is a carp in the 20 pound range. My incredible luck would have it that this is my first striper, and a potential record. I have a feeling it wont be my last! Here is a gallery with more pictures: posted by John | 4:10 PM
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