Man, where to begin? Today was a day full of surprises...
It was supposed to be my first snakehead trip of the year, the kick-off to a potentially duckweed-choked summer full of frog explosions and death-rolls and the gnashing of teeth in jaws of iron capable of snapping 30 lb braid and twisting hooks around and backwards. Early season snakeheads aren't always like that though. They typically move slow, eat slow, will merely peck at a silver-plattered chatterbait or swimbait rolled along the bottom. If you can coax one to the surface, they'll lazily follow and slap around a popper or frog, narry receiving the childhood memo of not playing with your food.
My walk to the snakehead spot takes me along an old canal, once used for shipping and trade along the Delaware in colonial times and now little more than a long ago carved and flowing ditch along the ancient river that's still cruised by the odd snapping turtle and spawning carp. I've occasionally caught stocker rainbow and brown trout, largemouth bass, pickerel, and other loose oddities from the place, nothing extremely out of the blue but there was always life.
This time, after returning for the first time since August, the canal was in disarray. The rock-beds and sunken timber that I used to be able to pull crappies and largemouth from were on dry land. The canal which used to holdover trout until the hottest months of an Indian summer was reduced to a simple sludge-brown trickle with no sign of even a carp. The "Stocked Trout Waters" sign nailed to a nearby oak was almost comical. I trudged along for the mile long trek upstream, if you could even assign an upstream and downstream direction to the sludge, and found that the large condo near the source of the canal had begun construction on what new lavishes, only God knows. A fallen tree had cut off a few powerlines right below, but all around their little Versailles, trenches were being dug and machinery was in a mechanical, buzzing array to clear trees for the expansion of a new water-front property, coming soon!
Skirting the construction in disgust, retiring around a game-trail guarded by watchdogs of stinging nettle and sumac, I ended up down at the river and at my old snakehead stomping grounds. A chatterbait was run through with no avail. I tried a tube jig and managed to pull out a lazy largemouth. The river was running too high for me to continue further up so I went down and fished a small eddy behind an island that a guy I met last winter walleye season told me about.
My first cast behind the island with a spook and a crocodile-like wake suddenly appears behind it. I threw back in, walked the spook for a few sweeps and it's engulfed by a toilet-bowl flush. All I can remember was setting the hook, a snapping sound, splashings, and nothing but slack line and the sound of the river rolling along in all her blissful ignorance.
You ever have those days where all of a sudden, nothing seems to be going your way? Suddenly, I was casting into trees, getting snagged in seemingly snag-less holes, and couldn't buy a bite to save my life. Sitting down beside an old sycamore and listening to the soft, beautiful dismissiveness of the ripples, I cut off my leaders, placed them in my trashbag, and slowly stretched out fresh fluorocarbon, methodically weaving it back into the braided mainline with an FG knot. Promising unfinished business with that spot, I packed out and headed back to the car to fish a second location, picking up any discarded plastic I passed on the way. As Grey Berrier from the PA Outdoor Writers Association likes to say, to anyone that will listen, "there's no season and no bag limit for picking up litter."
Upon arrival at the second location, I stood in the shadow of Goat Mountain and breathed in the river-water and river-air for a minute, before tying on a swimbait. Two casts in and that signature walleye-thump reverberates down the line. I set the hook and pull out a roughly 15 inch marble-eye, a keeper in our inland lakes, but merely a rat in the Delaware. Two casts later, I get another and soon, I begin a slow and steady pick of small walleyes in numbers that would make a winter-time river rat blush. They lacked in the size department, however.
As the sun slowly crept past Goat Mountain and winked away from view, I decided to make a move to a spot that could become impossible, or probably just a bitch, to navigate when it got too dark. The wade was somewhat sketchy, and in my infinite, overcomplicating wisdom I decided to challenge myself by walking across a fallen tree, but I arrived at a peninsula that stabs out a quarter ways into the river, creating a shallow rock bar that you can walk out into the middle of and throw topwater lures to both banks. In one last hurrah before it got dark, I managed to pull a decent smallmouth that barely sipped a popper of the surface. She had battle scars too, multiple heron cuts and a dorsal fin that was worn down to nothing. A fish with stories between the scales.
I drove back home right around magic hour of sunset, a billowing pillow of pinks and oranges, window down and breeze in my hair, flying down a Pennsylvania backroad with the psychedelic melodies of Sturgill Simpson singing out to the world from the Buick, wishing I could be there forever.
