Day 2 of the “20 Days in September” Project: Skunked at HQ

The pond was gorgeous, but all I could entice were a few lazy looks from suly bass.
Photo by Phil Monahan

Yesterday, I launched my new “20 Days in September” Project as a way to make up for a summer without enough fishing. All month long, I’ll be keeping you updated on the project, and I invite anyone else who had a rough summer to join in. I’ll be posting photos to the Orvis Instagram page hashtagged #20sepdays.

After a gangbusters first day on my favorite brookie water, I decided to see what I could bring up on the bass pond here at Orvis headquarters. Over the years, in an effort to keep these fish from getting hammered and to add to the challenge, I have established a few rules for myself when I’m fishing the Office Pond:

1. Topwater only. If the fish won’t come up to a surface fly, tough luck.
2. No more than one fly change.
3. Only one trip around the pond allowed.

A pretty nasty rainstorm had rolled through before I got out there, and it seemed to have put the fish down pretty hard. My first fly choice, a grasshopper imitation, drew little more than passing interest from the few cruises I could see. I switched over to a tiny popper, which could imitate a beetle of a variety of other terrestrials, and it did even worse. By the end of my trip around the pond, I hadn’t enticed a single strike. But I had spent a relaxing hour with a fly rod in my hand, under a glorious late-summer sky. That’ll do, bass. That’ll do.