Birthday Smallmouth

 

    The Delaware River in the summer. Even though it doesn't hold the fish it used to and many other northern rivers boast some admittedly higher quality fisheries, it's still full of life. The landscape turns into a symphony orchestra, from the croaks of tree frogs, to the buzzing of flies and popping of fish on the surface, to the ever-constant churning and flowing of the river, carving it's mark through the valley like a sculptor on marble beneath the blooming dogwood and maple trees. 

    The day tailing behind the Solstice was a special one for me. I was officially 17 years old, exactly one full rotation around our giant, fiery, life-sustaining ball of gas away from being able to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of The Law. I decided to celebrate this achievement by doing the thing I do best: catching 11 inch smallmouth. 

    When I first arrived at the river, I began fishing a culvert, a dam of sorts that drained into it. On the opposite side was a canal that ran parallel to the river, and a creek that cut across it and whose waters were released through the culvert. 

    I began throwing a small swimbait with little to show for it, when suddenly, a large rainbow trout leaped out of the water and attempted to scale the dam in some Sisyphusian maneuver, before the current took it back down. The philosopher could interpret this behavior as a metaphor for the human condition, an everlasting battle against life's struggles, the human-diverted flow acting as a watery Sisyphus's boulder. I, on the other hand, thought it was funny. However, that fish impressed me. There are no native rainbow trout east of The Continental Divide. There are no wild rainbow trout in the Central Delaware River. This was a stocked fish, raised in the concrete rat mazes of the New Jersey State Hatchery from an artificially fertilized set of eggs. It was fed pellets instead of mayflies and mummichogs, couldn't envision a home in it's mutated little chromosome deficient head besides the one made of concrete and plastic, and had never tasted a lick of free flowing water until it was thrown off the back of a truck, yet tried to scale this dam like a fucking steelhead. Why? 

    Still moving on as a river flows, and still answerless, I ended up in a set of shallow rapids. Casting out a jerkbait and letting the current dig that lip down a couple inches, I soon got slammed. The smallmouth that came up was the harbinger to a few more, none bigger than 12 inches, along with a crappie that ate a 3.5 inch keitech. 

    The lack of quality sized fish however, drove me further upstream. That's a phrase applicable both within this individual fishing session, but within the smallmouth fishery in the Delaware as a whole. The river no longer produces big fish like it used to, and the overall numbers have declined as well. The pattern on the river seems to be working hard for a few 11-12 inch smallmouth, especially in the summer months. While there's still decent populations up around the Water Gap, for a trophy 20" fish, the best course of action to take would be to go to rivers further west in PA, like the Susquehanna or Juniata. The point is, Delaware River smallmouth aren't doing great, through a variety of factors from industrial pollution to flatheads to lack of crawfish to a recent pattern of flooding during the last few peak spawning seasons. I soon managed to trick a fish into hitting a buzzbait, a 16 incher that jumped, dug, and fought dirty, exactly like a smalljaw's supposed to and exactly why I love these scrappy fighters so much. 

    

    That fish may not even raise eyebrows in a Wisconsin Shield Lake, or one of the many small rivers of Upstate New York, but it served as an important reminder of what makes these fish and these places the fish live worth fighting for. I'll hopefully have many more years to continue that fight, and invite anyone else to join me. 

Cheers, fishy people. 

Highs and Lows

 

Bro, you free today? 

Let's go for snakes today then. 

    As these two notifications materialized onto my phone screen in little blue clouds, I grinned. A few days ago, I had one of the best snakehead fishing days of my life. With an hour and a half to kill on a June evening, I set out with intentions to just catch one or two. What ensued was a shit ton of hungry snakes pouncing on every topwater and chatterbait that I threw at them. Today? Max wanted in on the snake charming. 

    After about a mile of walking down trails, slogging through creeks, climbing over logs, getting lost and unlost, we ended up at our spot. I rigged up a chatterbait on one rod and a toad on another, Max tied on a jitterbug, and Max's dad ended up throwing a chatter, sticking a nice sized largemouth within 5 minutes of us being here. Max soon also caught one that sipped a jitterbug off the surface. I upped the largemouth count a few minutes later with one that ate my topwater ribbit toad. 

    The log jam that I had slayed snakes on a few days before was pretty empty, so we pushed further and further up the system. I made a cast to the opposite side with the toad and began a steady retrieve on the surface. "Look behind it!" Max hissed at me. Sure enough, trailing the lure was a small northern. A cast back in front it it, twitch twitch, and boom, Kermit got smashed. I flip the fish up onto the bank, and as I'm debating whether or not to harvest this fish, it gave me an early answer by death-rolling out of my hand and flopping back into the water. 

    As my frog is gurgling across the muddy backwater, a pale flash appeared out of nowhere, emerging from underneath to suck it under. However, like a total douselight, I fucked up the hookset. Thinking I just missed a decent snakehead, I was pretty mad, and after Max informed me that judging by the angle in which he saw the blow-up, it was a big pickerel, I was still pretty mad but slightly less so. He soon made a cast with a keitech that got picked up by a mean, lean, and lime green slime machine. A very large slime darter too, one that stretched the tape to around 22 inches. (Chain Pickerel, in my opinion, do not get the love that they deserve. They are a cool and aggressive native fish that more people need to care about. Back to our regularly scheduled program). 

    Soon after, we decided to get out of there. Fast forward with some sketchy ass rapid crossing, and we found ourselves at a spillway we had fished many times before. As I threw jerkbaits and Max fished swimbaits, Victor threw a chatterbait up into the current, sticking 2 schoolie stripers. 

    While Victor was catching stripers and Max was missing hits on keitechs, I was blanking on jerkbaits. I reeled up, walked over to my bag, and started tying on a jig when I saw Max set the hook. A few seconds later, a mottled brown shape flashes into view, confirming that it was our target species. Our excitement soon turned into disappointment however, when that fish gave a headshake and that jig flew out of it's maw. Cinching down my loop knot, I dropped down and started jigging a 4 inch Easy Shiner, getting crushed within 5 minutes by another snakehead. A minute or two of death-rolling ensued, marred by the occasional headshake, duck, and dive, and I soon got a hand underneath the gill plate, and was able to lift the fish up unto shore. Short of 5 lbs and most likely full of eggs, I popped my jig out and sent her along her way. 

    A few minutes later, I threw my jig back in, heard Victor yell and a burst of drag, and looked back to see his rod doubled over like a hula hoop, braid running off the reel as his fish hit the current and used it to it's full advantage. Seconds later, the rod springs back up, the reel goes silent, and the line goes from taunt to slack. We still don't know what it was. If I had to guess, I would wager on it being a large flathead catfish, one that decided to slam what it thought was a small herring or alewife before going ballistic. It's those fish that get away though, that are the ones that keep us coming back. That thump you had on a jig that you missed, the drag screamers that go silent, that topwater blow up that you fucked up, or a fleeting sight of a 40 inch muskie or double digit snakehead that you knew was never going to eat; they all serve as causes for a series of perpetual hopes each and every time we get out onto the water, wondering, what truly swims in here? As anglers, being notorious optimists, we'll keep searching.

Cheers fishy people.