May is hands down my favorite month to fish. April showers seem to not only cause the hillsides to spring into bloom, but the elevated flows of the river that seem to come every mid-Spring carry thousands of cubic feet of water downstream towards their ocean-bound journey, creating huge pushes of fish that are going the other way. This is striper season, the end of shad, the beginning of snakeheads and flatheads, and the best time to catch big numbers of smallmouth and walleye. And I can't get enough.
I always sleep next to an open window. There's a quote from a conservation hero of mine, Aldo Leopold, where he said that he always loved waking up early enough to listen to the birds wake up. It was the birdsong of a few mourning doves that woke me up earlier today, while it was still dark and I still had several hours before I had to go to class, so I opted to drive down to the river hoping to intercept some migrating striped bass.
I pulled into the parking lot while another angler was rigging up a large shad swimbait. Shit, I thought. Better get there before him. I strapped on my waders, slung my tackle bag over my shoulder, grabbed my 9ft plugging rod, and started running. Take that old man. Twenty seconds later, he passed me on his bicycle. "Nice try buddy," he said, and I had to admit, he got me there.
We arrived at the end of the trail and my new friend and I started throwing lures through a current break. I was using a bucktail while he was throwing his shad. I soon get a hit, but I swing and miss. He starts retrieving the swimbait through a riffle and gets slammed, but the fish breaks him off. At least they're here.
Soon, two more anglers showed up, faces of regulars that I recognized. To preserve their anonymous identities, I'll refer to them as Jim and Bill. We set up a rotation, and Jim and I started swinging our lures through the break. All of a sudden, Bill throws straight over our lines.
"What the hell man!" yells Jim. "You just threw right fucking over us!"
"Oh yeah?" Bill retorted, "I'm just following your example. Every single fucking week I come down here to see your ass taking up the entire fucking spot." He gets right into Jim's face, practically spitting each word out. I reel my bucktail in and step out back from in between the two men.
Both men were getting heated at this point. However, even a boiling kettle will eventually spit and steam until eventually it runs out of hot air. That's what North-East fisherman are like. We're usually sarcastic, bitter, shit-talking assholes, but it rarely results in physical altercation. Eventually, they both got it all out and began fishing next to each other like nothing happened.
However, four people fishing a rotation usually turns into a shit show anyways, so I decided to head out and try something else. I rigged up by smallmouth rod and started throwing a little swimbait at a much less crowded spot. First cast, I catch a little walleye. Next cast too. Soon, I start picking off little 'eyelets that were stacked up at this spot almost every cast. Soon, something bigger slams my swimbait as I'm letting it flutter to the bottom. This fish runs into a log jam before I manage to pry it back out. It doesn't jump, so that ruled out smallmouth in my mind. Was this the 10lb walleye I've been looking for? It comes into view and I see a long, grayish shape dart into view and dart back out. I laugh out loud. Channel cats on artificial lures are always fun.
