Tyrannosaurus Fish

You could go dig up fossils of a bowfin, but it’d be more fun just to catch one.

[by David Paul Williams]

My wife had plans to travel across the country to attend an academic conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Now, I’m all for academics, but I planned to forgo the plane ride from Washington to New England until she said, “Honey, want to come with me to check out fishing in Vermont?” So, two months and a crosscountry flight later, I found myself standing in a canoe with guide Drew Price, fly rod in hand, scanning Lake Champlain for bowfin, a fish that has existed since before recorded time but beyond my ken until just a few weeks earlier.

Bowfin are the last survivors of a family of fish that swam when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Fossils of these living relics have been found from the Jurassic and Cretaceous period—roughly 150 million to 100 million years before the earliest salmonids. Like gar and coelacanth, bowfin are a connection with the past. Catch one, and you’ve caught a living creature with a fossil record.

These fish are known by a number of regional aliases—cypress trout, choupique, blackfish, and grindle. The bowfin’s natural range includes the Mississippi River drainage, eastward through the Gulf Coast states into the Carolinas and Florida. Northern migration took them into the Great Lakes, the Saint Lawrence River, and other points east. They prowl the backwater and slow, sluggish river currents, hanging in the margins of aquatic vegetation, sunken woody debris, and floating weed mats. A distinctive feature that you can see is their elongated dorsal fins that run from the middle of the backs, ending where the paddle-like tails begins. A distinction you can’t see is their swim bladder, which is laced with blood vessels and serves as a primitive lung that gives them the ability to live in poorly oxygenated water and gain oxygen directly from the air if need be. Weird fish, indeed.

Fisheries biologists have recorded bowfin that lived as long as 30 years, and others that weighed as much as 15 pounds and measured three three feet long. Vermont’s record, a 14½ -pounder, was taken from the Missisquoi River. In Lake Champlain, Price targets bowfin in the lake’s flooded timber, generally in water less than five feet deep. Bowfin inhabit the entire length of the lake and many of its tributaries.

Fight Club

Fishing for bowfin is not a complicated affair. Forget far-and-fine 70-foot casts, delicate tippets, or size 22 mayflies. This is brass knuckles street fighting— up-close, heavy work from cast to release. And when it comes to bowfin, casting really is a misnomer. There’s no casting at all—presenting the fly is more akin to dapping or vertical jigging with a weighted fly once a fish is spotted.

We canoed near the edges of Lake Champlain, looking for what Price described as a “. . . tube of bologna with fins.” He had rigged a four-foot piece of 18-pound-test fluorocarbon and left only a couple feet of fly line extended beyond the tip of the 8-weight rod. We had spotted a fish and moved right above it, but our ability to see it was hampered by all the lilies, tules, and other floating and suspended vegetation. Still, Price quietly positioned the canoe so I could drop the fly right on the ’fin’s nose. Following his instruction, I jigged the fly to take advantage of the bowfin’s aggressive disposition. These ancient fish won’t chase a fly the way a bass will, and since these low-cruisers are looking up for food, it’s critical to jig the fly above their eye level. And unlike ambush predators, bowfin give fair warning before the attack. The long dorsal fin ripples the water like a pennant in the breeze, and they flare their gills before inhaling the fly.

BY JOSEPH TOMELLERI

Price swears he can hear the fish’s robust jaws chomp down on the fly. A youth spent around loud engines and louder music denies me the pleasure of hearing the bite. But feel the bite? That I can do, and there was no mistaking the take. The eruption that ensued after I set the hook turned our gentle canoe ride into an afternoon in a fight club. Water sprayed and weeds flew as the fish twisted and turned, gyrated and tugged—it even employed the crocodile roll, a method of escape borrowed from a fellow prehistoric animal.

Bowfin’s sleek, strong, muscular bodies are ideal for slipping through weeds and dragging leaders against underwater structure, so Price cautioned, “Don’t let it get into the weeds.” I tried to turn it away from the bank with all its timber and vegetation and toward the small area of mostly open water. The key to winning a battle with a bowfin is to keep its head slanted toward the surface and away from vegetation or anywhere else it wants to go. In such a fight, it pays to have a nononsense fly rod with plenty of backbone—a fast-action rod with a fighting butt is required. With a measure of force, I was able to turn the fish before he got too far into the weeds. The fight was short and brutal, the rod bent double.

We handled the fish with a BogaGrip, to help us avoid the bowfin’s set of razorsharp teeth. According to the tale of the tape, this male fish weighed in at six pounds. While I admired the fish, it stared back, no doubt hoping to get a shot at me with its impressive set of teeth. I released it, fingers intact. The hunt resumed.

Bow Diddly

Bowfin spawn in spring, and the males, wearing their colorful spawning dress that includes an iridescent green belly, a green-and-yellow-streaked tail, and a turquoise head, handle the manual labor. The males build nests in shallow weedy areas on elevated root mats cleared of leaves and stems, and courtship takes place here. When the mating is done, females leave the spawning grounds, and the smaller males are left to guard the eggs and fry, which hatch about 10 days later. Fry consume aquatic invertebrates until they reach about four inches long, and they begin dining on insects, leeches, crayfish, and some forage fish, or as Price says, “They eat pretty much whatever they want.”

The diet of adult bowfin provides insight into what fly patterns and colors work best. Soft, seductive natural materials such as rabbit, or synthetics that mimic rabbit or marabou, give the appropriate strike-inducing motion. Rubber legs, the same color as the body material, add more meal appeal. Price ties all his bowfin flies on heavy wire hooks, having learned that bowfin can turn an ordinary trout hook into a pretzel-shaped chunk of metal. (I’ve even heard bass guys complain that a bowfin’s bite utterly trashes a crankbait, so you can imagine what it would do to a fly.) When selecting a hook make sure it has a sharp point. A dull point makes it difficult to drive the hook into that bony mouth.

Price starts to see fish in April as the water warms. Fishing improves in May and gets progressively better through the summer into September. He says the perfect bowfin fishing weather is hot, muggy, and sunny—the hotter, the better. The heat raises the bowfin’s metabolism and puts them on an incessant prowl for food.

For the angler in hot and sunny conditions, a sun hat, polarized glasses, and plenty of fluids are critical. Clouds and wind are the twofold enemies of sightfishing, as both break up the visibility.

I was raised on river and lake fishing for trout but have long since expanded my fly-fishing horizons to include most other fresh- and saltwater fish found in my home state of Washington. Funky fishing opportunities, such as suckers on a dry fly or ling cod in shallow water, get me jazzed as much as or more than targeting trout. Sight-fishing for bowfin is at the top of the funky fish list. My wife had a great conference, and I caught fish that can be traced to a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

David Paul Williams is an attorney, Realtor, and freelance writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington. Check out Drew Price’s guiding website at www.masterclassangling.com.

One Man’s Trash from Winged Reel on Vimeo.

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