Decided to run up to the ramp close to the house at lunch and managed to catch my first bass on a fly rod. He hit a little red popper next to some lily pads and put up a decent little fight

Nice! Ill bet that was fun on the fly rod.

Definitely...he fought well, couple of good jumps. Plus it's always fun to catch a fish with an audience and there were a few folks standing around when he decided to put on a show.

I remember 40 plus years ago me and a friend decided to to night fish the Warrior. Gonna launch at Smiths camp. He had a new rod and reel and wanted to test it before we launched the boat. His first cast was a 3 pounder. We stood on the dock and caught 30 plus fish. Never put the boat in the water.

Last May I drove up the road one night about a mile or so to a nice state boat launch with great lighting . I stood there several nights and the Mayflies were out by the thousands on those lights and floating on the water. We caught bream on flies and small popping bugs until we would just have to leave . Awesome fishing

Nice. I keep saying I’m going to try mine one day. I know that was fun

Awesome lunch break Gomer and great pic. Thanks for sharing

Gonna go back today at lunch and give it another try. I was doing ok yesterday with the little bream popper but was having trouble when I put the larger bass popper on. I was using about 5' of straight 8# mono but it wasn't heavy enough to push the larger popper through the air and it ended up piling up at the end of the fly line instead of unrolling. I retied this morning (after consulting ChatGPT :D) and tied on about 4' of 40# mono as a leader and then about 2' of 10# mono as a tippet. Allegedly that should be enough to push the larger popper through air better. We'll see how it goes.

Just get you a tapered leader

I had to make do with what I had on hand. The 40# leader/10# tippet worked really well.