3/4/24. That's the day this year when the first treefrogs of the year finally crawled out from their warming winter mud-burrows and climbed the trees that give them their name and identity, and sang to the top of their lungs, in unison to the setting sun hidden behind a curtain of stormcloud. When I heard them, I was out at the small lake up the street from my house, flipping and pitching soft plastics along the bank for early-season largemouth. They sing for each other and only each other, yet I nearly fell to my knees in thanks.
The previous day, Slavik and I had a hell of a time fishing for crappies. Lately, I've been referring to crappies by their Cajun moniker, "sac-a-lait," or "milk bag," a name derived from both their milky white flesh and similarity to their Choctaw name, sakli. Sac-a-lait are probably one of my favorite species to guide other people to fish for. My little sister Lauren isn't much of an angler, but she'll come with me to jig for crappies. When you find a big school of them stacked thick enough to catch them on every cast, it's a darn good time.
The trip started off, like many, at Skip's Outdoors, a small roadside hunting and fishing business in Stockton NJ, bordering the Delaware River. After securing some panfish jigs and nightcrawlers, I turned south towards one of our favorite confluences, a back creek that positively bristles with sunken trees and the crappies that hide within.
Sac-a-lait have a wishy-washy temperament. These Goldilocks fish don't like water temps too hot or cold, won't sit on the bottom, and rarely feed on the surface. What they do like, however, is structure, crowding around docks, sunken trees, rock piles, and each other. When targeting them, I pretty much always fish for them under a bobber, always looking to locate the school. Once the mass is found, picking individual fish off is quite easy.
We found the school immediately. Both fishing with floats, I set myself up with a jig and worm, Slavik with a soft plastic. My float dropped on the second cast, the jig being instantly converting to a small, writhing sac-a-lait. The hard part's already done. For the next hour, Slavik and I had a steady pick of crappies, getting float drops almost every single cast.
A watched bobber becomes almost like a living thing. Every individual twitch, dart, and slide that gets imparted cease to become fish-work and start to become intrinsically tied to that chunk of bright orange cork, which has a mind of it's own. Float fishing is by far, the quickest and easiest way to become lost, overtaken by tunnel vision.
Soon, my float drifts off to the side, never dipping down. I set the hook anyway. The float is converted into a white perch and a big surprise. A never-before seen specimen, at least by me, in this body of water, and too small for the fryer, I tossed him back.
Shortly around the time of the emergence of this white perch, a tragedy struck. A combination of shallow pockets, the act of bending down to rebait my jig, and just pure, un-adulterated clumsiness on my part, and soon, my cellphone was out of my pocket, falling off the bridge upon which we stood, and at the bottom of the canal before you could say "sac-a-lait."
I let out a few profanities. Slavik looks at me.
"What do we do?"
"Keep fishing." I had determined that the place my cellphone had fallen in was too deep to retrieve, and even if I could accomplish this task, water damage would probably rendered it useless by now. I would get a new one tomorrow.
And so, we fished on, on until the sun dipped down over Goat Mountain, before we packed up, hopped back in my little Buick, and took the half dozen or so crappies we kept back to my house for a fish fry. The tacos were as good as expected. Don't ask for the recipe because there isn't one. Measurements are for fish, not cooking.
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