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.
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