The clock's ticking. The cherry trees are in bloom, the daffodils have emerged, and last night, I heard my first tree frogs of the year. Yet, the river has been hovering right under the magical water temp of 50 degrees. Slowly, painfully, creeping upwards before a cold snap plummets it back down. I'm logging into social media to see pictures of shad starting to be caught from the river and am immediately hit with a sense of FOMO, thinking to myself, It's happening, I gotta get down there, I gotta get down there, before realizing I had just gotten back from spending hours freezing my ass off swinging shad darts and flutter spoons through riffles that once turned silver every spring from shad with narry a hit.
Walleye bite's been decent lately though. Once the sun goes down the gravel lizards are usually willing to hit a jerkbait or swimbait. I can't even begin to count the number of hours I've spent this winter, how many cold nights I've passed standing along the bank until the cold makes the atoms of my hands indistinguishable from that of the cork rod handle, anticipating that signature walleye thump that often times never came. But then came February. With February came the pre-spawn, that time where once clever marble-eyes were suddenly overtaken by their biological clock, the one that no concrete hatchery race-way could take away, the one that said, We need to spawn soon. It's time to start killing and eating stuff, and goddamit they got straight up stupid on some occasions. I doubt I'll ever be a walleye guy like they make 'em in states like Minnesota or Wisconsin, but I've gained a lot of respect for the fish and what it takes to dial that fishery in.
The other night, to try to save the failed shad expedition, I tied on an x rap and begin working a deep hole. Didn't need to wait too long for the thump. Beautiful 19 incher destined for the fryer, right around magic hour sunset.
Earlier today, I had some time to fish while there was still daylight out. Probably going against my better judgement, I ran down the river looking for Jersey Tarpon, The Founding Fish themselves, American shad. When I arrived, the water was clear and clean and raging, shouting, stretching, squeezing, carving itself in a gap between the concrete jetties where a set of rapids lay. I stood at the end, where a little plunge pool provided a slow moving back eddy to the adjacent raging torrent. Looking down, I saw a small buck shad slowly work it's way into the pool, resting, circling a few times, before making another push back into the rapids and start heading upstream, being guided by an invisible line that guided thousands of generations of his ancestors before him back to the place where he will spawn and die and float back down the river and return to the Earth, beginning the cycle anew. They were here.
I casted out a small flutter spoon, letting the current spin and wiggle it along the current seam. No bites. At one point, I bumped something and pulled back, two silvery scales along the point of the hook. With the water temps still in the mid-40's, the fish weren't in the mood to bite. I resigned myself to watching the plunge pool, observing shad after shad swim in to rest on it's upstream journey. I'll wish them good luck. Until then, I'll keep waiting.
