Chub Chasers! Fish Number 40 the Creek Chub!

Believe it or not, we've been after this minnow for over a year. We've spent hours fishing for creek chub relying on advice from other anglers, sampling data from NH Fish and Game and just plain luck. We figured we would catch this one easy. Every time we went to the Connecticut River we would spend time chasing creek chub because all accounts said this fish is extremely common in that watershed. We learned the hard way that accounts don't equal fish in the bucket.

Last Thursday we went to Beaver Brook in Alton where Fish and Game conducted electro-shock surveys in 2010 to study fish populations and the data showed chub were present. We fished a half-mile of the stream and landed dozens of fallfish, blacknose dace and brook trout. But we saw no sign of creek chub.

Saved this little snapper on the way

fallfish

brookie

Dave doing delicate work.

blacknose dace

Clay thinking about creekside sushi with dace, but then thought better of it.

Dave looking like a professional.

Clay landed what appeared to be a native brookie

Fishing like trolls under the bridge.

So we decided to table the creek chub hunt and go for longnose suckers instead. Again using data from Fish and Game we headed to the Ammonoosuc River in Twin Mountain. We spent two hours fishing there and caught lots of brookies, but saw no sign of longnose sucker. Even tried using dough balls to avoid the brookies, but the longnose snubbed us!

gratuitous nature shot

If you've never heard the mighty roar of a brookie you are missing out

After speaking to a local angler (I think his name was Travis) he suggested we find the deep pools below Upper Falls. So that's where we headed, but on the way there we passed a boggy looking area near the Mount Washington Hotel, and decided to drop a worm in the water.

It's creepy when Google Earth sees the fishing spot

road to the cog

You can see the Mount Washington Hotel from the spot.

A minute later we were on fish number 40, the creek chub Semotilus atromaculatus.  Luck WINS! 
We caught the fish on a #20 hook with a little piece of earthworm.

So proud!

That black smudge at the front base of the dorsal fin is a dead giveaway that this is a creek chub and not a fallfish

And with that, we were too excited to fish anymore....
This is the beauty of  The Quest;  a 4 inch creek chub is as exciting as a 15lb carp. (Maybe not quite, but it's still exciting enough for us to stop fishing.)


Stay tuned for the recipe!