If you’re going to take a trip to get away from it all, there’s really no reason to go any further than Wimberely, Texas. The GF and I reserved a room for a night in a little lodge outside town. It’s big advantage, it was on a creek with a couple of dams and a healthy flow of water despite the drought.
There were plenty of what I presume were redbreast sunfish. And in the clearer pools I could spot the characteristic white heads of cichlids, lurking close to the bottom. But none of those raised to the bait.
A local fisherman, and oldtimer as it were, insisted that the place was overrun with bass. But they were so wary that he said he had to rig his pole while hiding behind a tree so as not to scare them. He also told me that they had always called the cichlids “Pecos perch” which I thought was an interesting tidbit.
Meanwhile I caught mainly the regular Texas perch. I lost a few foam spiders in overhanging branches, but most of the action was on your run of the mill prince nymphs. There was one brief flurry of warmouths taking to a black gnat, but that was short lived. The presentation with the best result was dropping wet flies into the water overflowing the dams. There were usually a couple of sunfish waiting to snatch any bugs that came tumbling down, and the water was turbulent enough that they couldn’t spot me very easily.