The season has gotten started for the warm water fish in one of my favorite non-trout streams.

The walleye spawn is still on but mostly passed so I hit the stream looking for the small mouth that follow them in from the Canal that this feeds.

I wound up touching the leader on my first Walleye (short, about 14"), and catching a couple of the average smallmouth for here. The water temps are in the mid 40's so it took dead drifting clousers (and losing an entire fly box worth) right on their noses to catch them. Once they were hooked, though, the fight was as hard as I remember, putting a deep bend in my 6wt and tearing line off of my reel.