The Windy City.

A quick trip to the Windy City gave me the opportunity to explore the Chicago River and Lake Michigan for a day. The hotel was right next to Grant Park so I planned out a 4 mile loop that would cover the lakefront, Navy Pier and a good stretch of the Chicago River.

Early morning rain delayed the fishing so I met up with @wancketanglers and stopped by the Orvis shop. The staff was out back giving casting lessons in the back alley behind the building. We checked out some gear at the shop and made sure we had all the flies we needed to hit the city.

The rains remained pretty steady throughout the morning so we stayed in the shelter of the bridges along the Chicago River and bounced some plastic crawdads on the bottom in search of some urban smallies.

I was surprised at the depth of the Chicago River. A good 20ft deep and straight down to the bottom along the river banks. The weather was rough and we had no luck pitching jigs to crawdads. We did see a lot of carp jumping and would love to head back sometime and bait fish the bottom. The water was so murky and so deep I saw no possible way of catching a Chicago River carp on the fly.

Once the heavy rains stopped I followed the river out towards Navy Pier and found a small inlet with an “ENJOY FISHING” sign posted. I proceeded to fish that area next to a local target for over an hour and caught bluegill on the fly and had on a really nice largemouth bass that I lost at the net. Once I decided to head to Navy Pier to try for perch I noticed that the ENJOY fishing sign hand been hand painted over a NO FISHING sign and I had been fishing illegally the entire time. My bad.

I checked things out at Navy Pier and saw no way of getting fish up the bank with the equipment I was throwing, so I headed south along Lake Michigan and finally found a swarm of monster carp along the bank. They were very curious and surprisingly aggressive towards the fly but would just charge and never took it. It was fun to see this behavior from carp but also extremely disappointing that non of the big boys would eat. I did successfully land a Rock Bass and had a Coho hit the fly but missed the hookset.

It was a very quick trip to the Windy City, but I will be back and am eager to hit the same loop and explore the Chicago River some more.

Please practice Catch & Release in urban settings to preserve these precious resources for other urban anglers.