10,001

 

    I've been sleeping right next to a open window to summertime and foxes and the requiem of mourning doves. No bluelight up to an hour before bed does wonders for the body, mind, and spirit; that holy, angular trinity that appears everywhere. My dreams are becoming more often and vivid, only require naturally about 6 hours of sleep. Prayer and cooking are sacred acts because they are spontaneous; I should like to be spontaneous as well. To see windows everywhere. 

    One of those windows opened this morning, letting in the drizzling rain that deepened the colors of the Sycamores and faded away the white spots on the fawns that followed me down the riverbank. That window was a mysterious one of moon phases, lunar majors and minors, astrological things that caused our mortal brains to buckle under their joyous divinity and would probably still bear such weight until the end of time. 

    It opened with wide, toothed jaws of Esox masquinongy. I'm not quite sure where I first learned of the existence of the muskellunge, but from that moment on they became a mythical river monster in my mind, not a species to be targeted but one whose existence you-know-of and encounters with are druid-like and accidental. Muskies are a strange ordeal. No fish drives anglers madder than striped bass, but muskies are a close second; however, muskie madness is different. There are no "muskie blitzes," no situation wherein a crowd casting plugs can stand shoulder to shoulder hooking muskies every cast. Muskies drive a solitary madness, the greater kind, for the weight of isolation can drive one to a greater madness of swirling thought than any sort of demented company. 

    I think of fishing in general like windows too, interceptions into tiny pockets of ichthyological life. Spots where you cast for hours until the ripples on the water start to blur together and you start to question insanity can become teeming with life in seconds. On this day, I worked my way down a smaller creek that drained into my beloved Delaware River where I knew muskies sometimes sat, both up in the deeper pools as well as at the creek mouth where suckers and stocked trout would get washed out. I threw a large topwater spook and managed to catch a decent smallmouth, saw some suckers, and found a newly hatched Map Turtle walking about. It felt right. It felt full of life. 

    I worked my way out of the creek mouth, still throwing that spook around with nothing to show for it in the river. A few carp jumped around. I almost decided to call it a day, pack up and head out. However, there was one more bend that looked good. I brought my lure over it, walking it almost all the way back to the bank, when a giant green shape comes out of nowhere and inhales the bait right at my feet, jumping clear out of the water. 

    I don't remember setting the hook. All I remember was the reverberations of my 8ft heavy casting rod, me wrestling with this fish in waist-deep water, all the while hoping, praying that I could land it. When I got her shallow and grabbed the tail in my hand, I screamed. This was it. This was the culmination of five years of wanting a muskie under my belt. It was surreal. I shook as I snapped a few pictures. She was still super green from the short fight and I kept her in the water for most of the time. I popped the hook out and she kicked off before I could get a proper release. Still shaking, I checked my lure and one of the hook points was broken off, a little souvenir, something taken. 

    I've caught a lot of fish in my life. That muskie right there probably made me happier than any singular fish ever has in my entire life. It almost felt like something divine happened, some window had to have opened, with the key being something spiritually between all of the river trash I had picked up over the years, hours and hours in the cold and rain around moving water without another soul around, or simply the dumb luck that I don't believe in. As soon as I got back into cell service range, I called Max. The first words out of my mouth were, "I did it." 

    A few days before that I caught that fish, Slavik and I were having dinner and talking about a muskie that he lost two winters ago. I said that right now, I think that muskie fishing is something that I could get into, but I'm not sure that I want to. Slavik responded that he thinks if I don't want to get into it, I won't. Now that I've done it once, I think I want that high again. Gonna start working on my figure-8s. 

The Jersey Blues

 

    At least once a year, I like the stumble upon a good jetty bluefish bite. Very few things in fishing compare well to the carnage that happens when a school of bluefish come through and the most effective lure in the spread simply becomes the one that you can throw at them quick enough. At Barnegat Inlet the other day, the wind was ripping from the South-East at about a billion knots and the fluke bite was pretty much non-existent. I got a small blue on a fluke bucktail and mistakenly thought that the school had arrived, but my next few casts bore no fruit and I was proven wrong, simply driven back to first base.

    I walked further down to the tip of the jetty, where I had access to not only the ripping current of the inlet side but also a shoal of rocks on the open ocean. When I arrived, there was a line of anglers crowded along the tip, with one guy consistently picking off bluefish on plugs by casting into the whitewater in that shoal. I threw a diamond jig at first, the only lure that could cut through the crosswind just by the quality of being a solid chunk of metal. However, I threw that around for about 15 minutes with no bites and I believe that picky bluefish are a myth, so I tried a few more plugs then switched back to fluking. 

    Making bottom contact with such a cross-wind soon proved to be a monumental task and so I was cursed with the Jersey blues. I switched back to the diamond jig as the wind died down and the tide went out, creating a small belt of whitewater along the edge of a rocky shoal where all the bluefish stacked up in. I started catching them every cast on the metal. Most of them were smaller fish, but still fought like the possessed little yellow-eyed demons that they are. 

    A limit was soon put together, and I began to catch and release fish or otherwise give them to a Mexican family that was also lined up on the tip of the jetty. I tried to break the language barrier and ask them for bluefish recipes but my communication was poor and this was unsuccessful, making Spanish just one more thing I need to learn. 

    

    While the blues that myself and the people around me were pulling in averaged around a pound, I soon got a thump on a metal jig that felt much heavier. This fish pulled drag and I had to fight it around several large jetty rocks before I got it close enough to see that it was the nicest bluefish I had laid eyes on all day. I climbed down the rocks, wearing jetty cleats, and waiting for a wave to powerwash some whitewater over the jetty so I could pull up him up, ending with my personal best bluefish in hand. 

    That fish was released as my limit was already established and a big bluefish like that would have a filet that was more bloodline than light meat. After I landed that fish, several other inlet anglers immediately rushed over and started hurling metals and plugs over where I was standing, which I took as a sign to head out, following the lighthouse back to the parking lot with the satisfactory weight of a full fish cooler slung over my shoulder, taking the opposite path of decades of boat travel. 

    The summer's begun, it flows in like sunrays that permeated through the windows on my drive home and lit up the scent of salt and the sound of gulls. My hands felt properly torn and salt-coated too.  Beautiful little vagrantries. 

Earning your Stripes

 

    It's hard to pick favorites, but if I had to choose one species to fish for the rest of my days, my vote would be heavily drawn towards ol' Seven Lines. I do stupid things for stripers. Swimming/wading out to rocks in the middle of a river boulder field, cutting significant chunks of time reserved for sleep in the fall to striper fish, dropping way too much money on plugs, etc. etc. etc. I have an entire collection of books whose topic is the sole pursuit of this one fish. I've seen fights break out between grown men over striper spots. And I wouldn't change a thing. 

    The river was unfishably high for almost two weeks, giving time for fish to push into new slots and seams for when it finally drops down to peak flow. That first day, I waded out to a partially submerged boulder and climbed up, beginning to whip several large plugs through a current seam. I've got what I call a top-> down approach to striper fishing, where I'll start off trying to draw a strike with a pencil popper or adjacent large surface plug, then begin to work my way down. I popped that current seam for a while, worked through the white water, then switched to a minnow plug again without so much as a scratch. I figured going deeper was probably then going to be a necessity, and so into my plug bag I reached and out came the 3/4 oz bucktail, no trailer necessary. 

    Launching the bucktail past the current break and letting the current swing it through, I gave two bounces and came tight on the first cast. This fish pulled drag and I had to muscle it around a big boulder before she showed herself in all striped and glistening glory, ending up as the largest river bass to ever chew up my right thumb. 

    I snapped a few shots of her before placing her back into the water, where she clamped down on my hand and then let go to give a big kick of her broomtail and going off. That morning, I picked another smaller fish on a jig before I had to head out. 

    Striped bass are built for power, not speed. One look at that wide broomtail without a deep forkage can tell an experienced angler that these fish can hold in some extremely fast water, with powerful bursts of energy to snatch prey out of that shallow water. My river bass game has a lot to do with finding fast whitewater with lots of rocks, where fish will be sitting to ambush prey. 

    I've also been enjoying the positive pressures of putting others on fish. After a good morning where I had a steady pick of fish on swimbaits and minnow plugs, I've been taking Slavik out to a few spots where I've helped him get on some stripers, the first ones he's caught in a long time. As an aspiring outdoor guide and as a human being who tries to put experiences on a higher pedestal than materials, watching my friend catch fish in places that I love has been very rewarding and I encourage any other experienced angler or outdoor enthusiast to do the same. 

    Striper fishing can be challenging, frustrating, and incredibly rewarding. There are two primary times of year when my mind becomes completely and utterly occupied with seven stripes. The first is in the spring, right now, when the fish begins to run up the rivers down the street from my house, a time where tree frogs sing and current breaks over rocks try to whisper and roar over them. The second is the fall when they start going back down the open, by then desolate sand beaches of New Jersey in sprays of bait and silver and blood-red sunrises over the ocean. My fishing logs these times of year sound more like the ravings of a man possessed. But I'll keep fishing for them and keep writing, as long as I'm haunted by moving water.