The Ghosts of the Neshaminy

 

    When I was first dipping my toes in this whole fishing thing, the place I went to learn was the Neshaminy Creek. A 40 mile long creek running entirely throughout some imaginary lines on a map called Bucks County, a section lay less than 5 minutes down the street from my house. When I was done with school, my mother would drop me off and I would spend hours running around, netting minnows and crawfish and catching stocked trout and scrappy smallmouth. It was at the Neshaminy where I caught my first smallmouth, first brown trout, first trout on the fly, and countless other memories. However, it is also my Sissicu, my U.S. Grant Creek. And while it still has life, it has turned it into a husk of it's former self, a watery shell that once played host to countless moments on the water but has been discarded since by industrialization. 

    The Neshaminy flows past several different smaller industrial plants and construction sites, which served as sources of it's undoing. High amounts of PCB's, heavy metals, and other hazardous chemicals began to find their way into the water. In 2022, the PA Fish and Boat Commission made the decision to stop stocking the Neshaminy, issuing warnings against eating fish from the watershed that the Indians once called, "The Place Where We Drink Twice." 

    I hadn't realized to the fullest what had happened to the Neshaminy until I fished it on a July afternoon with some time to kill. It had been over a year since I had last stepped foot in the creek. What I came to see was almost unrecognizable from it's former self. The schools of killifish that I used to always net and drift as bait for smallmouth and trout were extremely thinned out. Almost no weeds existed in the places were huge hydrilla pads and milfoil once existed, providing cover to many a rockbass or smalljaw. There were no sunfish cruising the shallows. No suckers or chubs. 

    I spent about half an hour casting ned rigs, small swimbaits, jitterbugs, desperately hoping for a tug that never came. A tug that would have served as a symbol of survival, a will to live and consume against all odds. I keep moving upstream. 

    Some mayflies are buzzing around dimpling the surface and creating their own little whirlpools within their own little ocean. Nothing is rising to them. A splash off in the distance creates a fleeting hope that leaves with the wood duck that momentarily touched down in the creek. Still, her presence as well as that of a snapping turtle provide some creature comfort. Life finds a way. The creek will heal. 

    Desperate for a sign of ichthyological life, I tied on a trout magnet and a float, drifting it down the deepest hole I could find. It gets dropped by a native redbreast sunfish in a few drifts. 

    It wasn't anything completely fire, certainly nothing like how it used to be, but I soon was able to catch a few redbreast, green sunfish, and rock bass drifting a magnet. Rock bass were an especially welcome sight because of how sensitive they are to sudden changes in water quality. I admire that about them. Rock bass know what they like and how they like it, traits I greatly respect in people. They don't take crap from anyone. They weren't big fish, but each little tug on the line was a message reading, I'm still here. 

    At this point, I hadn't seen a single smalljaw. I decided to throw a Hail Mary and tie on a topwater popper. I pushed further and further upstream, ringing the doorbell at each and every hole with the short pushes of water emitting from my plug. Soon, someone answers. My popper disappears with a toilet-flush of a blow up. I give a snakehead level hookset and my rod bows up. The fish explodes in a zip of drag, fighting all the way in with that signature smallmouth spunk. It's a big fish too, tapering in just at 19 inches. 

    Unfortunately, she was very thin and malnourished. I always feel bad when I catch fish like that. I love catching smallmouth, but I didn't feel the same amount of joy landing one of my biggest of the year usually would have produced. Some of the biggest smallmouth I've ever laid eyes on were in the hole that I pulled this fish from. Now, it almost feels like they're a dying breed. I hope I'm wrong. I pray I'm wrong.

    The Neshaminy isn't the Bushkill. It isn't the Yellowstone. It isn't the Columbia. It doesn't draw angler tourism. However, my guess is that there's thousands of little streams, lakes, and rivers around the world in the same predicament. This story goes out to them all. 

Cheers, fishy people. 

Natives, Invasives, and All in Between

Native (noun):

1: One born or reared in a particular place 

2a: An original or indigenous inhabitant

2b: Something indigenous to a particular locality

      These are the words straight from the authority that our society deemed the expert on words, the Webster's Dictionary, that are used to define the term "native." Native is what the Lenni Lenape were to where I live in Pennsylvania, native is what the oaks were that gave them shelter, and native is what the shad were to the river that fed them. In today's modern angling culture, here in the United States, we place a strong emphasis on "native species," one that is well deserved in my opinion, born from a genuine desire to protect the species that called our waters home long before we did, hoping that they will do so long after we are gone. 

    However, here in the North-East, and I assume in many other places in the country, many of our most beloved gamefish species aren't native by definition. What's more American than largemouth bass, for example? While they did originally inhabit this country, largemouth are native to The Deep South. I love a good summertime smallmouth fishing session as much as the next guy. However, there wouldn't be anything sucking down poppers and crushing tube jigs if they hadn't been brought out in buckets from the Ohio River drainage. Muskies? They called the Great Lakes home, as well as northern portions of the Mississippi and Ohio. Ditto for the walleye. Brown Trout are immigrants from Germany. Rainbow Trout were isolated land-locked populations of Steelhead in the Pacific North-west. If not for stocking, the Delaware wouldn't have any of those species, but would still contain numerous suckers, chubs, shad, and stripers. 

    The dilemma seems to have morphed into a simple valuing of all established gamefish species, regardless of their native status. Everyone loves largemouth bass in America. We all love smallmouth, crappies, and walleyes (which I don't understand). You can't find a single person anywhere in this country that hates trout, unless you're talking pelletheads and you're like me. Yet bass anglers especially hate native chain pickerel, and I've seen people kill and dump native suckers while trout fishing. I inadvertently explored this dilemma by targeting two invasive species in the Delaware River that weren't stocked, at least, not on purpose, Northern Snakehead and Flathead Catfish. 

    My original objective for this short afternoon session was to test out a 13 Fishing casting rod that Max had gifted me for my birthday on some snakeheads. Thanks so much, Max. I walked in to the spillway and began throwing a spinnerbait. A snakehead followed it in on my 1st cast. On my 2nd, it got smoked. 

    After the snake unhooked himself and wriggled back, I was soon joined by another angler, an older gentleman and his son, who were throwing live eels for striped bass. Soon, he gets a pick up and swings into another snakehead, which he landed and proceeded to club to death. I don't blame him, when everyone and their mother is claiming that snakeheads wreak havoc on our ecosystem. However, I did make a point of carefully releasing the next fish that I caught, a large female snake that hit a paddle-tail swimbait. 

    I soon moved down to the dam, where I wanted to try to jig some stripers. It was late in the season for my seven-lined friends, but I knew that flatheads were a big possibility too. I put on a pink zoom fluke and began bouncing it off the bottom in a deep hole. Tick. Tick. Tick. Slam. I set the hook and the bass rod I'm using doubles over like a hula hoop. 

    A burst of drag rips out from the reel, followed by another and a series of headshakes that bounce the rod tip almost a foot with each movement. I spent a few minutes cranking and pulling, trying to do my best to get this fish off the bottom. Soon, a shape the color of pine bark materialized into view, a beautiful flathead just under 10lbs, marred by spawning scars. I climbed down from the dam and managed to get a hand under the gill plate, dragging him up. My first flathead on a jig. I'm now convinced that these are one of the hardest fighting fish in freshwater. I'll most certainly be targeting these with lures more. 

   

    Many people blame flathead catfish for the decline in the Delaware River smallmouth fishery. They're certainly a factor in my opinion, as a 30 lb flathead will inhale a 14 inch smallie like a pork roll sandwich, but definitely not the only one. Either way, I'd never kill a fish that I had no intention of eating, and that wasn't an option considering the 90 degree weather and my lack of an ice chest. 

    Make no mistake, flatheads and snakeheads shouldn't be here. However, they're here and there's nothing we can do about it, and if you can't beat them, join them. They are extremely fun and challenging to catch, a worthy target of any angler. Smalljaws ain't supposed to be here either. 

    The point of highlighting snakeheads and flatheads isn't to adopt a pro-invasive species rhetoric, but to high-light how hypocritical we are when addressing native and invasive species. I believe that restoring and protecting native species should be at the forefront of any conservation movement. It would be a dream come true for a re-established native Atlantic Salmon population to reach fruition in the North-East, a healthy population of native chubs and suckers would benefit the entire ecosystem, and I don't want shad and stripers to ever stop running up in the river in their rituals that serve as the harbinger of spring. The snakes and flatties seem to be doing fine on their own. 

Cheers, fishy people.