Neil Farley

Author: Neil Farley
Location: Southwest Ohio

Growing up in Southwest Ohio I learned how to fish for smallmouth bass in local rivers from a very early age.  Most days in the summer were spent wading or canoeing the Great Miami, Little Miami, Stillwater, and Mad Rivers for smallmouth and the occasional saugeye or walleye.


Living in the Dayton, OH area you fish for smallmouth because there are very few flat water spots that are under a 30 minute drive. Occasionally trips to local ponds would produce a nice largemouth here and there, but why waste time catching largemouth when you could catch smallmouth the same size or bigger!


Once in college at the Ohio State University I began to fish and learn new river systems that included the Olentangy, Scioto, Alum Creek, and the Big & Little Darby.  While in Columbus I started to also fish flat water a bit more and species more accustomed to flat water including crappie and largemouth bass, but was still sold on moving water.

While growing up my father was addicted to whitewater kayaking as much as I was to fishing.  Often times I was traveling during my grade school and high school years to West Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Canada, or other whitewater kayaking destinations.  Admittedly, most of the travels during these years were made under protest. As any young kid I wanted to hang out with friends and not a bunch of "old" people at a campground.  As the years moved on I began to appreciate the fact that I visited places like the New River, Gauley River, and Meadow Creek, or places with strange names like the Youghiogheny, Obed-Emory,  Chatooga, Nantahala, Ocoee, and Pukaskwa.

By the early 90's my father followed his passion and opened what was at the time a small whitewater kayak shop in Dayton, OH,  Whitewater Warehouse.  At the time I had no idea how this event would affect the rest of my future fishing adventures.  With a ton of hours fishing from canoe or wading I found a new tool to help catch fish...the kayak.  I bought one of the first ever sit on top kayaks on the market, a Dagger Pegasus. When I was ready to buy the kayak the only one available was purple or I could wait a month or two and hope another color was available.  This sit on top kayak was designed for whitewater and was outfitted with things like thigh straps. (The pegasus was since re-released as a different kayak entirely that was geared for the recreational kayaker).  I was now a proud owner of a purple whitewater kayak and soon to be fishing kayak! It was about 5 years later the kayak manufacturers started to see a market they needed to design kayaks for: the kayak angler.  Since that first kayak I can't remember all of the kayaks I have used to stalk fish not to mention keep up with all the kayaks now on the market.

In 2011 I found out about an online kayak tournament called Kayak Wars.  This website first introduced me to the idea of competitive, but fun kayak fishing.  Previously, it was always just a goal to catch more fish than the person I was fishing with that particular day.  After participating in Kayak Wars in 2012 I began to pay closer attention to species of fish that I would normally not be interested in targeting.  I mean who gets in a kayak and says, "Let's go catch an 11" perch" in February?  I always envisioned perch fisherman sitting up on shore on a 5 gallon bucket with a coffee can full of worms in one hand and rod in the other (sorry grandpa!).  What I didn't realize is how hard it is to land certain species of fish that had a minimum size limit.  Kayak Wars opened up a whole new element of kayak fishing.

While participating in Kayak Wars I met a group of anglers I began to fish with more often. After a year of kayak fishing together we decided to organize our own tournament.  The more I got into the planning stages of a tournament the more I was leaning towards a full blown tournament schedule.  Within days we went from organizing a single tournament to the birth of the Buckeye Kayak Fishing Trail.   The trail gathered a lot of interest and became a tool for many anglers to meet others (in Ohio and surrounding states) with the same passion.  It also helped anglers learn new fishing techniques, different ways to outfit fishing kayaks, and for some anglers the opportunity to become a pro-staff member with a company.  The greatest part of the Trail for me was to see anglers have a very difficult time catching fish in their first few events, but then competing for top places in later events just by learning new fishing techniques from other anglers.

While I have yet to slime a kayak in saltwater I have also had the opportunity to fish in the Carolina's and the Gulf of Mexico for saltwater species. Some of those catches include yellow-fin tuna, dolphin fish, gag grouper, speckled trout, redfish, snapper, flounder, sea bass, black tip shark, spanish mackerel, king mackerel, pompano, flounder, and triggerfish.  If I started to make a bucket list one of the top items on the list would be to catch all those species in a yak.

I hope my kayak fishing experiences contained within this blog help promote kayak fishing and provide a spark for other kayak anglers to get out on the water!

Be sure to check back often as you never know what kind of blog posts will be showing up...

-Neil

Sean Stone

Author:
Sean Stone

Location:
 Southern Ohio

Education:
 Peebles High School, Miami University of Ohio Graduate of 2012: Bachelors Degrees in Envrionmental Science and Geography

Work:
Wastewater Treatment Plant Operator in Peebles, Ohio

Fishing Career:

  I spent much of my childhood on the banks of local lakes fishing for carp and catfish. I guess its what most people would have called our "family night out." We'd grab a few nightcrawlers, box of wheaties, and a bottle of vanilla extract. (Some of you carp guys will get that one.)We'd spend the evening and most of the night on the bank waiting for action. Some nights were better than others, and to be honest at that point in my career carp were my favorite species to target. No other fish grew as large and were as numerous as carp.  On occasion I would get the opportunity to fish my great grandparents pond for bass and bluegill. Those adventures were your typical red and white bobber and night crawler trips. Bluegill were numerous during these trips and the potential of hooking a good bass (at the time a 2lb bass was a monster) was fairly high. 

When I turned 16 and got my first car my fishing style changed tremendously. At that point my fishing became pretty experimental. One day I would fish a creek for smallmouth, the next I would fish for largemouth in a state forest pond, and on the weekend we would fish for catfish at the local lake. I still had no idea what I was doing, but I was having fun doing it. Between 17 and 18 I spent a lot of time on the water chasing the largest species of fish I could, which meant going back to the banks of local lakes and rivers. I would sit all evening with a couple rods out, waiting for a large catfish or carp to swim by. This is where I started to grow as an angler.  Instead of doing what we did as a family during my childhood, I ventured out of my comfort zone and started experimenting with baits, rigs, equipment, etc.  It was this experimentation that took my fishing level beyond what I had learned as a child. At the age of 17 I met Amanda which changed fishing as I knew it. Fishing had went from an "I" sport to a "Us" sport.

Once I hit 19 and started college my fishing became pretty limited to the weekends. However, my college experience was really crucial to how I would continue my fishing career. The study habits that I developed in college carried over into my hobbies. Long nights spent doing research papers had finally served some purpose. I bought nearly every publication of In-Fisherman, Ohio Game and Fish, etc. and spent countless hours on the internet researching each species of fish. I studied life cycles, habitat preference, local fishing reports, distribution ranges, etc. It gave me a broad understanding as to how fish behave, and to some extent allowed me to make educated guesses as to where I could find them. I started to develop a pattern of fishing preference. I would target crappie in the spring during their spawn, after that I would focus on pre spawn largemouth and catfish, during the heat of summer we focused on carp and smallmouth, and in the fall we reverted back to largemouth bass, catfish, and then crappie in that order. It kept us on decent fishing year round and allowed us to hone our skills for each species. The excessive writing that I had done in college had given me a foundation to build upon and share my passion for fishing with others. A friend and I created a blog and my passion seemed to show through my writings.

At the age of 22 I got my first boat, a 14 foot aluminum jon boat. Being able to get to places that other people on the bank couldn't, had a tremendous impact on our fishing. We caught more and larger fish than we had ever in the past. At this point carp took a back seat, bass and crappie would steal the show during the day and catfish would rule the night.

Since catfishing was primarily a night event, and 50 percent of the weekends were night it was safe to say that we spent most of our time chasing catfish during this time frame. It was a very steep learning curve but we managed to find a few nice cats along the way.

In the beginning of 2013, 23 years of age, I had gotten pretty tired of fishing out of a jon boat. Most trips were spent with 3 people cramped in a small 14' boat, which was way over its maximum weight capacity. When it came to bass fishing, I always got the short end of the stick. Being the third person in the boat meant that I had to fish behind the other two. I tried everything I could to overcome the pressure of fishing spots after they had seen 2 baits already. I experimented with baits, but once I found a pattern it seemed that the anglers in the front of the boat quickly caught on. Soon enough I was fishing third, behind two people throwing the same baits I was. After a year and a half of doing this I was ready for a change. This is where I shifted my attention to kayaks. Getting a larger boat was an option at this point, but it didn't eliminate my problem while bass fishing. I ended up selling my jon boat in the spring of 2013 and buying three kayaks. It opened up nearly 200 miles of streams and rivers that we couldn't fish with the jon boat. It allowed me to fish separately from the group and introduced me to a style of fishing that I had yet to experience. Kayaks have been a great way to get into spots that are rarely pressured, so our fishing success increased. The jon boat took us away from heavy hit bank spots which increased catch rates, kayaks took us even further away from pressured water. Kayaking in the last year has really changed our style of fishing. We started the year in March fishing for crappie. From there we focused 80 percent of our fishing efforts on bass, partially because we got involved with Buckeye Kayak Fishing Trail's tournament series. Although we had deep roots in catfishing, we only spent a little over a dozen trips specifically fishing for cats. Kayaking this year has really opened up smallmouth fishing for us. Before this year, most of our smallmouth fishing was done withing a quarter mile of heavily pressured public access points. Kayaking and Buckeye Kayak Fishing Trial has opened up a lot of opportunities for us, including this blog.  I am pretty excited to be apart of it and I'm anxious to see where we go from here.