Solstice Fireflies

 

Fireflies reflect the sun, save a bit for an evening snack, then try to glow to make up for oversleeping at its brightest peaks and most golden valleys. I've been standing watch over their slumber, summer-rising at dawn to the requiem of mourning doves in the season of the fireflies. Last night, Sharkey and I were spending the evening gathering mulberries in the dark, grasping for their fuzzy leaves like a pair of blind silkworms. Our favorite mulberry patch was infected by a nasty blight, a giant splotchy and oozing bud of purples and whites. On our way to the next one was a marsh of cattails and iris, teeming with blackbirds and the occasional head of a still-wandering snapping turtle in wetter months but now relatively dry and empty. However, on this night, it was absolutely infested with a swirling disco of fireflies, a cacophony of little blazes springing up every second as if they were trying to make the most of summer while it lasts. We just stood there, in that hot and heavy June night, watching the light show, marveling at its beauty, its act of resistance just by living. Someday in the near or distant future, I'll be away from the rolling forests and farmland of South-East Pennsylvania, and that's when I'll remember summer nights like this one.  

Pocono Chronicles pt. 2: Rock the Canoe, Don't Tip the Canoe Over

    My backside is still sore from sitting in a canoe for four hours. My whole fishing life I've had little access to boats, instead becoming a certified bank-beater, slipping in and out of shorelines by rivers. Most shirts I own have thorn-holes to testify. However, Max recently got a Poconos House right next to a chain of five private lakes, all connected and all accessible by canoe, which we decided to explore for an afternoon while I was up there visiting. 

    Pocono Lakes are different from the ones I fish in South-East PA. They're colder, more tannic, with edges splattered with small patches of lily pads instead of being completely choked with duckweed. The tannic, shallow water creates a perfect environment for chain pickerel, a species I don't catch too often. Therefore, a big slime rocket was very high on my radar. However, like usual with pickerel fishing, smaller cookie-cutters seem to dominate the biomass. Max and I started off catching many picks from both canoe and shore on spinners and spinnerbaits, but none that could have peeled line or hula-hooped a rod. 

    Canoe fishing is disorienting for someone like me who is used to solid ground. I sneak up on fish from the bank, taking careful steps over twigs always with the reassurance of cool earth beneath my feet. When gliding on canoe atop the mirrors of waters into a shallow cove, it almost feels like flying, like the ground beneath you isn't real because it isn't, it's just an allusion made of a thin sheet of tin over a mixture of cloud tears and sweat and spring blood. 

    The earlier afternoon bite was very slow, with the air hanging heavy and the sky gray and cold and unforgiving, threatening rain at any minute. The fish stopped touching my big lures, while Max worked a school of crappie with a small in-line spinner. They were big crappies too, some of the consistently biggest I've ever seen. I guess it's not too surprising, on a private lake where your only competitors are the cormorants. 

    Max tossed me a crappie jig and I was about to tie it on when something in me stopped, grabbed the biggest jerkbait I had with me, and decided to throw that instead. Soon, I tied into another pickerel. Then not five minutes later, I get thumped and boat probably the biggest yellow perch I've ever caught. 

    We came up upon a wind-blow bank filled with fallen trees and a steep drop off. Textbook perfect. I skipped my shadow rap right next to a fallen log, then turn to Max. 

    "This is about to get eaten so-" and before the words left my mouth a two pound largemouth latched onto the back of the jerkbait. And so commenced a half-hour of chaos, where Max and I were able to pick off fish nearly every cast, a mixed bag of largemouth and pickerel and crappies and perch. 

    It was when we reached the shallow unsheltered end of lake when Max and I then ran into an issue. The wind, in all her rambling wilderness, was leading us extremely astray, blowing us off course when we tried to drift past a bank and either carrying us too far or too close. We drifted clear across the lake, catching a few largemouth and perch on the troll, before we decided to drift across the middle of the lake at the mercy of the wind, jigging in deeper water as we went, which gave me the opportunity to pick off another big perch on a paddle-tail swimbait. 

    The big pickerel eluded me again. That's alright. In fact, a big specimen of any Esox to me is almost more concept than fish anyways, more of an excuse to ignore crappie jigs and throw big jerkbaits than an actual conceivable goal. I'll probably catch one bass fishing one day. 

    Also, my ass was sore the entire chilly summer late-night drive back home. 

Pocono Chronicles pt. 1: Save a Native, Eat a Stocker

 "I want to see mountains again, Gandalf. Mountains! And then find a quiet little place where I can finish my book." - Bilbo Baggins 

    South-East PA is teetering on the edge of a heat wave. A bit of it built up, flashed, burned, and exploded into lightning the other night, bringing with it a slight sample of rain as if to say you'll need this, but now temps are ticking back up to the high 90's right on time for the first week of summer camp at work. 

    I've been dizzily reminiscing in a heat-filled fervor about the weekend prior where I was able to escape, slip up to the gates of the Lehigh into the Poconos, where the air was cool and the grey tree frogs hummed me to sleep between mountains. One of those days, Max and I were able to escape garden work for two hours and hike up a small stream in Hickory Run State Park, a little liquified slice of freestone that slithered from the cold, cold, cold underground mountains above to spring up and chill life to the bones of whatever it touched. 

    The first sight when we pulled into the parking lot was a bright red-amber mushroom gleaming against an ochre backdrop. A few days before, Victor had found several reishi in the area and this new patch confirmed that many more were springing up in the area. 

    Max and I worked our way up the creek, me with my 5wt fly rod and a #18 Parachute Adams, Max with his spinning rod and a trout magnet. This was my introduction to small stream dry-fly fishing, so my expectations were low. The sight of four trout hanging out in the first plunge pool that refused to eat flipped them around and back again, a jumbling chunk of molding limestone. However, Max was able to pick off a few small wild browns further upstream and I managed to take a break from getting caught in trees trying to bow-and-arrow cast long enough to miss a brookie. 

    Stumbling through little groves covered in moss soft-enough to sleep upon, with the mid-morning air still heavy enough to amplify the greens and blues that softly whispered through my hair, I came upon a small waterfall splashed with aqua-marine crystal, clear enough I could see every trout in the pool. I lay down my dry fly in front of a brown trout tucked up behind a rock and it rose, gulping Adams, water, and sky all at once. I stick it with the hookset and land it after a brief fight, bringing to hand my first ever trout on a dry fly. 

    A brief look at the fish's crooked and concrete-scarred fins revealed very quickly that it was a stocker placed atop of wild fish and so I whisper to the grove and bonded it with a nearby piece of hardwood, washing stocked trout blood into Hickory Run to mingle with wild fish blood and insect blood and probably a little of my blood as well, pricked upon by thorns and stinging insects. 

    Max soon joins me in my little Dodona with its sights and giddy prospects of raging stream, landing another stocker on a golden trout magnet while I was able to get three more fish to rise to the Adams. None of them stayed pinned long enough to be brought to hand. It's alright. I enjoy any topwater fishing so much, bringing these snub-nosed and snub-brained creatures I spend so many waking hours in pursuit of to my world for a second of their own volition. 

    Soon enough, Max manages to catch a native Pennsylvania freestone Brook trout in all it's parr-marked and haloed self. These cold quiet streams used to be full of them. Old-heads used to talk about how they would catch 100 big ones a day, all on dries. Now, we have to pick through stocked browns and rainbows to catch our state fish. I don't really mind the practice of stocking trout in our Philly area streams or in any places were native trouts don't exist. It's a great way to get kids and old folks out fishing, it's fun, and a source of food. However, stocking fish on top of native brook trout, especially in a mountain free-stone stream is a bad deal. Stockers are vacuums, sucking up all the mayflies, caddisflies, and baitfish before the heat of the summer does them in. Save a brookie, kill a stocker.  

2024 First Catfish Soak

     Whilst the commonly used phrase, "the more the merrier" rarely applies in the realm of fishing (a world of secret spots and lost friendships when you catch the buddy you brought to a said-secret spot in confidentiality back there the next week with more buddies), I don't catfish alone. Friends shouldn't let friends catfish alone. Catfishing should be done with the chorus of tree frogs and drumming of the slow whine produced by the swarms of nighttime insects that won't give you a moment's peace. So on a warm May evening, the same night as his senior prom, I picked up Slavik and called Max to meet us down at the Schuylkill for the first night-time flathead soak of the season. 

    We had with us a variety of offerings to the catfish, as I had caught a dozen assorted sunfish and rockbass while Max provided us with live shiners and a trio of freshly caught stocked trout. Therefore, we were able to set up a smorgasbord for the cats, a three man, seven rod spread with all three on the menu, targeting a channel where a local creek flows into the Skuke. As the sun set, the misty riverside air was almost giddily heavy with anticipation at the thought of one or more of these rods doubling over with the weight of a big flathead. 

    They say that one man's gamefish is another man's flathead bait. I fully believe in this saying, both philosophically as well as from a practical aspect, and therefore had no qualms about lopping off the head of a stocked brown trout, threading it onto an 8/0 circle hook, and casting it out into the middle of the river with a 4 oz weight for a flattie to latch onto. 

    I was soon proven right when the drag on my surf rod starts screaming as a fish picks up the trout head. However, as soon as I locked down the drag and begin to fight the fish, my rod pops up with a snap and the line goes weightless, drifting slacklined with the current. The flathead must have rubbed off the braid on a rock. Should have invested in shock leader. 

    We sat in the hot, muggy, thick Philadelphia darkness marred only occasionally by lights in the distance and the alien-rasps of a great blue heron looking for easier prey. Not fifteen minutes later, Max's drag also sings bass with a live shiner. As he picks up his rod, the clicker on my conventional reel, also baited with trout, sang tenor. Max missed the hookset, but my fish latched on, and in complete darkness I fought this flathead, my first of the year, to the muddy ledge where Max stuck his hand into its maw and landed it. 

    A ten pound flathead is about average for the Schuylkill, but a great way to kick off the season, a harbinger for many warm, dark, no-see-um filled nights to come. 

    We untangle and set up the spread and soon enough, Max gets another run on a whole dead shiner, which also gets off. However, within that same bite window, Slavik gets a bite on a flapper, a butterflied piece of dead sunfish designed to flap in the current. He manages to stick this fish, and fights it while I slide down the mud-ledge to land the fish in near-complete darkness. Turning my head-lamp on revealed a long gray shape instead of the browns and oranges of a flathead. I reach my hand down to grab the fish's bottom jaw and feel nothing. Panicking, I wrap my hands around the blunted snout and gill it before dragging it onshore, revealing a giant channel cat with one eye, a severe overbite, and many parasites. A fish with battle scars, survived and even thrived in the Schuylkill thus far, growing to be one of the biggest channels I've ever seen. 

    Soon afterwards, the entire hole goes silent as the window slowly closes. It's incredible how easily your mind wanders and wavers with the dying of anticipation, as the waning moon creeps on yet higher. I love night fishing, am sustained during the winter months by creeping around the dark for river walleyes. I was also blessed with my mother's lack of ability to sleep in, and when it's not walleye season, wake at sunrise each day to the requiem of mourning doves, requiring very little true rest. Therefore, I could fish all night. Drive back in the morning perfectly fine. However, one look at my companions revealed an energy imbalance. So we made the call to pack it in after midnight. Flatheads will be spawning soon, so I'm glad I got in at least one session before it gets slow for a few weeks in preparation for the chaos of July.