A Sugar Creek Adventure

The old adage of the best laid plans of mice and men; occasionally, seems like rarely these day…a plan comes together. Memorial Day of this year found me, Frank Terkhorn, my dad and Frank’s good friend from Mississippi, Bill Pacey, headed north to float and fish Sugar Creek. As plans go, there are things you can control and things that for obvious reasons…are simply out of your control.

The Thursday before found thunderstorms rolling across northern and central Indiana dumping a lot of rain into the Sugar Creek system; I watched the USGS gauges as they spiked to over 2300 CFS on Friday morning and just hoped that they would once again fall and by Sunday, the 25^th the gauges were once again down, just a bit higher than normal for this time of year. While the water was dropping I knew it would be a crapshoot as to water clarity; would it be brown with junk floating in it…just a little less than that or hardly stained at all…truth is we wouldn’t know until we ‘hit’ the water.

We (Frank and I) would put in at the new DNR site located between Crawfordsville and Shades State Park and float/fish our way southwest toward the Jim Davis bridge where we would meet up with dad and Bill, have a quick shore lunch, swap out Bill for Frank and then once again Bill and I would do the lower section back to Deer’s Mill (the edge of Shades State Park).

The un-known was the water color and as I neared the stream with my Creek Company Voyager pumped up and ready to go I could see that clear wasn’t happening…but it wasn’t muddy either, it was as I thought somewhere about halfway between coffee and clear; picture a creamy cup of tea and that was what we were faced with. I planned on fishing a shad colored minnow pattern as I thought it would be best ‘seen’ in the stained water. Frank and I made arrangement to be at the Davis bridge in 3 ½ hours and shoved off with lots of bug spray and an eagerness to land a big smallie.

I have fished Sugar Creek in about every shade possible and while I knew this wasn’t an impossible hue…I knew that it was sure to be tougher than if the water was clear. As I passed Frank I said to him, “This may be a new learning curve today”…knowing that it was going to be a fishing puzzle; truth is that I was surprised when about half an hour later I felt the all too familiar jab at the end of my line, strip set with my line hand and in a minute was taking a photo of a nice 15 inch smallie(pictured above). The neat thing with this fish and the photo…we were directly below a Bald Eagle pair, one was sitting about 25 feet from a nest that was about the size of a small car! As you look at the photo above the eagle, nest and tree is located just above the fish and as I floated under…Mr. Eagle didn’t move at all and looked very stoic; inside the nest I could see another adult eagle and what appeared to be more activity in the form of chicks. All said it was very cool to land a nice fish and then float directly under this beautiful scene.

The upper half was pretty good to me as I landed the 15 incher from above as well as a nice 17 inch fish…then lost another of equal or greater size. We pulled into Davis Bridge at about 12:15; grabbed a quick bite for lunch and shoved off with Bill fishing from Frank’s Voyager. Our boats are about as perfect for this kind of fishing adventure…however, there are lots of little nuances to get worked out while trying to fly-cast from a moving craft…one that has lots and lots of little knobs and buttons for fly line to get caught on. I could see that Bill was a good fly-caster and while he was struggling with all these little things, he would indeed figure it all out. I focused on my own casting and catching and with about a hundred or so canoe enthusiasts now floating by…it became very important to stay focused on the task at hand. I switched to an optic yellow streamer that I had tied specifically for this dirty water; I was making long, slightly upstream casts and then swimming the fly down and back to me. We hadn’t gone far when I once again connected with another solid 15 inch fish…the rest of the float would yield 2 more 15 plus inch fish and a couple in the 10 inch range; certainly enough to keep my interests up.

About halfway down I could see that Bill was figuring out all the differing physics involved in our mission and was starting to look very productive. The water was stained enough that you could see the tops of boulders, but only if they were within 6 inches of the surface. At one point I was entertained as Bill was going to step down from the seat to walk and cast (something that can be done pretty smoothly from the Voyager)…only to find that he had misjudged the depth and was heading into water that would have more than went over the top of his waders. To his credit he saved it with some upper arm strength and quick reactions.

We all had had a wonderful day and while the fishing wasn’t fast or furious, the camaraderie and scenery were top notched; when combined with a great shore lunch prepared by my gal Vickie…it was just one of those great days to be out and about in Indiana. If you have never experienced Sugar Creek, its fishing, float trips or the amazing scenery…then by all means, make plans and get going this summer and I am sure you will Enjoy the Great Outdoors.