The March of Bass and Salamanders

    "Of course it hurts when buds burst, why else would spring hesitate?" - Karin Boye 

    A good friend of mine recently moved to the city of Seattle, thousands of miles and a Continental Divide away, where rivers no longer flow north to south. We still stay in touch and occasionally, she'll bring up the weather there. There's an ever-present wet and grey that sustains the evergreen and ever-wet forests surrounding the city. As someone whose river is usually cursed with bad flow, I always thought that sounded nice. The past week where I was home from school made me rethink my gloomy disposition. 

    

    My original plan entailed packing up the Buick with jerkbaits and jigs, heading north to the famed Delaware Water Gap, and spend a few days searching for the elusive 30-inch Delaware River walleye I've been hunting like Ahab for several years. The early spring rains had other plans. The Delaware swelled and screamed and raged, far too much for it to be fishable. Therefore, I made the call to stay closer to home and fish still water. 

    Lake fishing was never my forte. Currents are readable; I can look at a stream, a creek, a river, and pin-point the deepest channels and holes, the shallow riffles, where fish are most likely to hold up. In a still-water environment, it's like wiping a poem off a slate, going in blind. Starting over. 

    Still, I know how effective still-water fishing can be, even from shore, and therefore am determined to dial it in. Over the span of a few days throughout my spring break, I managed to catch a decent number of largemouth from a few local lakes, as well as lose a giant that picked up a soft-plastic and ran before I had time to set the hook. Another missed opportunity, another reason to go back. 

    Most of these bass had very red lips and red crushers, a sign that they were feeding on crawfish, so the fact that I was throwing crawfish soft-plastic patterns seemed to work out well. Bites and pick-ups were often extremely subtle, as if they were hesitant as the first few days of spring in which they bit. 

    A species that failed to hesitate, that sped out of their winter holes as quickly as they could, were the salamanders. A week beforehand, I couldn't find a single one. Now almost under every rock, every log, there were Eastern Redbacks that scurried at the sight of the world above. Their numbers will only grow with the passing weeks as we near the vernal equinox.