There's a half-acre farm pond off Highway 316 that hasn't seen a serious angler in fifteen years. I fished it last Tuesday and learned more about wind direction than I have in a decade.
The pond belongs to a cousin of a cousin. It's the kind of pond you drive past a hundred times without seeing — half-screened by pines, fed by a culvert from a cow pasture, with a leaning dock that hasn't held weight since the second Bush administration. My uncle used to call it "the bream factory." He hadn't been back in twenty years.
I went out at 7am with two Zebco 33s, a coffee can of crickets, and the idea that I'd catch a dozen palm-sized bluegill, fry them with cornmeal that evening, and be home by lunch. By 9am I hadn't had a bite. By 10am I was sitting on the dock thinking about driving home.
Then the wind changed
The wind had been out of the east all morning — directly into my face on the dock side. Around 10:15 it swung south and started pushing little ripples across the far corner of the pond, where a fallen sweetgum lay half-submerged. I'd ignored that corner because the sun was wrong; you couldn't see into the water. But within twenty minutes that corner had become a different pond. The wind was pushing surface food — gnats, pollen, whatever — into the eddy behind the sweetgum, and the bream had moved with it.
I caught nineteen bream in the next ninety minutes. The biggest was a hand-and-a-half hand-spread coppernose, the kind of fish you only get out of a pond nobody's touched. I kept four for supper and let the rest go.
What I should have known
My grandfather used to say "fish the lee, never the chop." What he meant — and what I'd forgotten — is that on a still-water pond, the windward bank is where the food piles up, but the leeward edge of cover (the calm side of any obstruction in the wind shadow) is where the fish stack to ambush it. The east wind had been pushing food past me toward the south bank all morning; I was standing on the wrong end of the buffet.
The lesson
Before you tie on a single thing, stand still for five minutes and watch the wind. Not the trees — the surface of the water. Find the calm patches downwind of any structure: a stump, a log, a point, a dock pylon. Fish those before you fish anything else. On a small pond it'll double your catch. On a big lake it'll save you an hour of trolling.
I'll be back at that pond next month. I'll bring my grandson, and I'll make him stand on the dock for five whole minutes before he ties on a hook. He'll hate it. Then he'll catch a fish, and he won't hate it anymore.