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.