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.
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