The river's swollen and covered with broken chunks of ice, a root-beer float of cold spring water flowing from every run-off from the Catskills down, slowly crawling towards Delaware Bay. A few days ago, I tried fishing my walleye wintering holes during what I thought would be a break in the weather. Instead of my jerkbait, I was the one getting hit, by all four types of precipitation in less than an hour.
By then, the temps had dropped considerably below freezing. Everything was cold. I was cold. My fingers and toes were numb, but it was a good kind of numb. The type of numb that lets you know you're still there. I made one last cast with the jerkbait. Twitch. Pause. Twitch, twitch. Pause. Every stop, every pause, every single twitch that brought life back into the piece of plastic, metal, and wood was a source of hope. The shivers in my spine were fueled by a mixture of the cold winds and an anticipation of that heavy thump on the end of the line. A thump that never came. I clipped the back treble hook to the hook-keeper at the base of my rod and set it down. I was done.
I sat beneath a maple tree, watching the pouring rain turn slowly into sleet, watching the sleet turn into snow, watching the aforementioned three daughters of the ocean experience frequent interruptions by their attention-seeking sister, Hail. It had gone down almost 20 degrees since I'd arrived. I could feel the front moving in, slowly pushing the clouds away.
The walleyes I had been dialed in on until mid-December seemed like years ago. The sight of a snakehead waking behind a frog, the feeling of a flathead thumping a jig or a striper sucking down a swimming plug, the sound of a chorus of treefrogs, an eternity. I missed them. As much as I dislike them, their beady, soul-less black eyes and snake-like hisses, the geese had the right idea. Florida sounds nice.
I'm writing this while hunkered down in my room. The cold snap came in, grabbed any warmth left in it's icy fingers, and is currently holding it without bail for the next few days while the wind howls across these valleys and woods I call home, completely free and unmolested. Maybe once it clears up I can get back out before the year's end for walleyes. Maybe even muskie. Maybe wild brown trout. I don't hate winter fishing. It gives you space and time to think. 2022 beat the shit out of me. I'll need it.
Cheers, fishy people.
