I tried covering new ground from last week, although I was limited by fishing holes that were more or less on my bike ride home.

Lying very much directly on my ride home is Blunn Creek, the drainage that runs through Big and Little Stacy Parks in the Travis Heights neighborhood. I’d never attempted to fish there before, and I can tell you that the best fishing always has an element of exploring.

I had to go almost all the way down to lake level before I found a pool filled with fish. But once I did, they displayed a challenging wariness that was extremely satisfying to overcome. I had to back up to the point were I was out of their line of sight, and then pitch the fly down a narrow lane of tangling bushes.

Have I mentioned yet that I’ve been tying my own flies? More on that later I suppose.

The best fishing of the week came at the same pool where last year I had caught a snake (or to be more precise, a snake attempted to catch the fish that I had already caught). The pool lies not far from the flagship Whole Foods, sandwiched between luxury condos. On my back cast the fly sometimes smacked against the windows of people no doubt far more important than me.

Even though there are warmouths as well as cichlids in these pools, they didn’t take the foam spiders I teased across the surface. I had to once again stand over the fish horizon and toss in the sinking nymphs. But that unlocked the best cichlid fishing I’ve ever encountered.

The Rio Grande cichlids are probably the most beautiful fish you can catch in Texas. When you see them in the water, the smaller juveniles look like they have white heads and three vertical stripes between the dorsal fins and the tails. But when you get them up close you can hardly see those verticle bands. That macro-coloring melts away into beautiful peacock spotting.

Some other notable catches at that pool included the first Mexican tetra of the season, and a medium-sized warmouth that fought with such strength that I had to play out some line. Playing a fish is not something you expect to do when you’re in a creek narrow enough that you can touch the far bank with the tip of your rod.

This was a very shallow pool, but it was deep enough to catch a hand-sized pumpkinseed in its full breeding coloration. Or at least what I’d been calling a pumpkinseed. The a visit to the freshwater fish identification page at Texas State completely failed to mention pumpkinseeds or clear up my confusion. But these sunfish are frequently hybrids, so I’m not being a stickler about taxonomy. The important thing is that the fish fought like a fist-sized hellion, and he’s probably still there for any brave souls who want to catch it on their line.

On Thursday, Third Degree and I met to re-enact one of our first and greatest urban assault fishing outings.

The Waller Creek riverwalk, Austin’s lame alternative to the San Antonio Riverwalk, is a great avenue for fishing. The best places to drop a fly were the heads of pools where schools of warmouth cluster around the inlets waiting for bits of Doritos to wash down to them. I was able to stand just a little over their horizon and toss a nymph down to them and enjoy the sight of dozens of fish rushing to take the bait. At least until they got spooked.

Let’s take just a moment here to enjoy the picture of a man with three hundred dollars worth of fly rod holding a three-inch sunfish:

Friday was the shortest fishing trip of the week, but it had it’s moments. While I was stringing up my line before jumping down into Shoal creek, a couple of college kids on bikes came up to me, and I was just about to break out the standard nondescript answers to civilian questions, “a few fish” and “no, I don’t eat them,” when I realized that they were there fishing too. I gave them some advice, but stopped short of telling them about my favorite fishing spot that I was headed to later, the spot that Third Degree and I have taken to calling “The Cichlid Hole.”

Sunset at The Cichlid Hole was a quiet and pleasant moment. The surface of the pool was littered with red blossoms. At first I thought they were lost fishing bobbers and I was a little angry at the thought that somebody else had the nerve to fish there, but they were simply nature’s way of decorating the end of an already beautiful week.

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It’s a place filled with refuse, both inanimate and otherwise. Back in the 70s, the civic leaders of Austin pushed to make Waller Creek a centerpiece of the city. They built walkways and walls. They compared the project to the riverwalk of San Antonio.

Unfortunately, their civil engineering wasn’t the equal of their civic vision. Unlike the riverwalk of San Antonio, Waller Creek was a living waterway prone to flash floods that tore up architecture and plastered every protrusion with plastic garbage bags and broken tree limbs.

The city is currently digging an overflow tunnel to make these events a thing of the past, but for the time being, Waller Creek is largely unused, despite running through the heart of the “entertainment district.” While we plied the concrete walks during a quick Sunday afternoon fishing trip, Third Degree and I saw plenty of bums and a pair of folks who gave a strong “oldest profession” vibe, but no actual citizens.

The closest we came to crossing paths with a respectable person was when a tourist watched us from an overpass while we fished in Austin’s Symphony Square.

A thin trickle of live water kept the pools of warmouth and green sunfish fresh. Third Degree was pleased to catch his first cichlid on a prince nymph.

I challenge anyone to say this is not an attractive fish.

I caught the largest fish of the day largely by accident. I mis-cast and my wooly bugger plopped just over the edge of the concrete steps that line Waller Creek near Eighth Street, right in view of the cop shop. While I struggled to untangle the mess I made of the line, a giant, squamous-bodied warmouth took the bait and dived into the algae mats.

I challenge anyone to say that is not an ugly fish.

The big surprise came when we explored the fishing options of the Austin Convention Center’s settling pond. This is part of the usual environmentally conscious storm runoff system. You can’t see from the photos, but it’s shaped like the State of Texas.

It also happens to be filled with tiny little bluegills. They must have been jammed into the pond shoulder-to-shoulder. The poor little hungry buggers snapped at anything that fell into the water. The only challenge was choosing flies small enough to fit in their cute little mouths.

Give them a few years and we’ll see some decent fishing in there.

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