Sometimes, especially when the fish are looking up, all I want to see are the takes. So I took some flies and cut off the hooks at the bend so I could fish, without catching. I have done this in the past when dry fly fishing on the Upper Delaware. If I had a good drift and saw the trout's rise with his mouth open I knew I could have had him, or just enough to make me think I might have. So now I do that with striped bass from time to time.
Last evening I jumped states to see if I could find some fish on the now receding waters. It's down into the 40's and with every 10,000 cfs drop the fish are in different locations. I made one cast with a recently tied herring pattern and on the first cast a fish blew up on it. I just had that feeling there were more around, and were there ever. I switched flies and took one of my old and battered hookless flies and spent the next hour and a half tuning up what was probably 40 striped bass into a feeding frenzy.
I didn't see the bait as I had over the past week and that tells me it's not here anymore, at least for the moment. It might also mean as the water lays down the bass can do bassy things again, like set up in ambush positions, and look to eat. As I played with the fish all it took was a 25' cast with a skittering action across the top. The bass hit that hookless fly, and I think some swallowed it, but the retrieve quickly becomes like a circle hook and it pops out. And when one fish was done with it, another was right there to eat it again, and again, and agin. On one retrieve I had seven blow-ups, eats, and swallows. These weren't all dinks as some like to call them, a few were in that 30 inch range.
It was every single cast for an hour plus. It was harmless. It was steady. It was fun.