Wildside column: On a day when traditional technique wasn’t working, a new ‘dangle’ was spot on
Ray Thys of Marion battles a thrashing smallmouth bass that he hooked last Sunday using the “deadly dangle” technique. (Orlan Love/correspondent)
On a day that I would prescribe for good fishing — calm, overcast and humid — the bass were in a foul mood.
They would bump top-water lures, but would not take them. They would either bite off the tails of my plastic minnows or suck on them until they felt the slightest pressure on the line, at which point they would simply let go.
It looked like last Sunday was going to be a long, slow day on the water until my fishing buddies — Mike Jacobs of Monticello and Ray Thys of Marion — discovered and soon perfected a technique they christened “the deadly dangle.”
With his fly rod bent, Ray Thys fights a smallmouth bass while Mike Jacobs watches during an outing last Sunday on an Eastern Iowa stream. (Orlan Love/correspondent)
The ever alert and adaptable Mike noticed it first when a bass struck his sinking fly at the end of his retrieve as he briefly dawdled before lifting it from the water.
Mike Jacobs of Monticello admires a 17.5-inch smallmouth bass caught last Sunday on an Eastern Iowa stream using a technique that came to be known as the “deadly dangle.” (Orlan Love/correspondent)
Hmm, he thought, maybe I should try that again.
At the end of his next retrieve, with his fly just a few inches beneath the surface, he not only paused before extracting it but also jiggled the tip of his fly rod to impart additional tantalization.
Again a bass struck his fly, and after battling it in the water and the air, he landed a 17.5-inch smallmouth that proved to be the largest of the approximately 90 bass we caught that day.
It seemed as if the fishes did not really want our offerings but, at the same time, they were loath to let them get away.
Mike likened it to the “figure 8” maneuver employed by musky anglers to entice strikes from fish that followed their lures to the side of the boat.
Quick learner Ray promptly adopted the technique, which paid dividends for both fly fishers throughout the remainder of our five-hour float trip on one of Mike’s favorite secret streams.
But for a spin fisherman like me, with heavier tackle, my dangle was not all that deadly, and I had to find a different technique to overcome adversity.
On previous visits, I had classified the stream as on the border between big creek and little river with depth, current and substrate ideally suited to the smallmouth bass.
On Sunday, however, it was lower, slower and clearer than any of us had ever seen it, and with duck weed collecting along the banks in the tops of emergent vegetation in several dead calm stretches, it looked more like classic largemouth water, which I fished accordingly by slowly dragging a plastic-tipped jig through the deepest, slowest water available.
Since none of us could recall ever catching a largemouth in that stream, I was a little surprised when I caught my first one but less so when I caught my 20th.
When we finished fishing I Googled “deadly dangle” in an effort to discover whether Mike and Ray had discovered a successful fly fishing technique or merely stumbled upon an established practice.
All I found were references to earrings.
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