Yesterday the third year Brenden and I have fished the lake on the second Thursday of the month, the only thing that put a shadow over our hopes of doing even better than last year was the full moon's later arrival. The last couple of years, we've been off by a day. This year, three. The solunar hypothesis was an unproven theory 50 years ago when I used to read about it, I believe, in Bassmaster Magazine. It still is. I do understand the moon's pull on the tides directly affects marine and estuarine ecosystems, but besides increased light during clear nights when the moon is full, I don't understand how the moon affects a freshwater lake during the day, although I may simply not know. The truth is, when Brenden told me the full moon would be three days later, I felt we might not do as well as we had the past two years.
We caught 46 fish in 2023, 61 in 2024, and 40 yesterday. Before I began working on the post you're reading now, I posted on the NJ Multispecies Facebook site a couple of photos and that we caught 39 fish, my having forgotten the 21-inch pickerel I caught. Most of what we catch here have always been largemouth bass, and most of the rest, pickerel. I wound up with 14 largemouths, three pickerel, and a rock bass yesterday; Brenden caught 13 largemouths, nine pickerel. His biggest bass measured slightly under 20 inches. We fished six and a half hours. Needless to say, it's a liberation from so many recent days getting skunked or catching one fish. Brenden hasn't been doing badly down the shore, catching stripers and bluefish.
I always do well on the lake, but it doesn't always fish fast. When three fish get caught over the course of a six-hour outing in September, patience is tested, but even then the same essential connection is made. The bass are almost always good sized.
Through the summer, I'm usually throwing a Chompers Shaky Head Worm, but we've made some great catches on topwaters. We also troll deep divers, and though we usually catch pickerel, we've also caught largemouths and even a smallmouth. Once we caught bass on Chompers as deep as 32 feet, weighting the worms with slip sinkers under a bluebird sky, but usually I'm fishing 15 feet or shallower, throwing the worm unweighted on a an inset hook.
The weeds weren't as grown in yesterday as they will be, so I threw a Wacky worm. Caught all my largemouths, the rock bass, and the big pickerel on purple and brown; my other two pickerel hit a Bogosian jerk bait. Went through a whole pack of purple Yum Dingers. Fish kept pulling them off the O-ring and hook. Fish I didn't catch. Fish I did catch. Looks like I'm headed to the Blue Star Shopping Center in Watchung to do my grocery shopping at the new Shop Rite. I can pick up a few packs of Dingers on the way home.
It's not an entirely predictable situation, although for all I know, if we fished nearer the full moon, it would have been more so. Maybe not. We saw herring dimpling the surface on nine or 10 occasions, but never encountered the great bait balls of last year where bass and pickerel hit jerk baits left and right. Brenden caught a few on the Bogosian yesterday, but I started doing so well with the Wacky worm that he switched and pretty much stuck to that presentation.
Although we caught some on a weedy flat--enough to tell us we probably could have caught more there--a definite pattern emerged yesterday. We found most of the bass staging along steep shorelines and often right up against the bank. Last year, most of the fish came from seven or eight feet of flatwater where the bait balls swayed back and forth, although all three years, we have caught some of the fish where we found most of them yesterday.
I had forgotten my sonar unit, so we never got a water temperature, though I suspect it was in the upper 60's. For all I know, Brenden's 20-incher could have been a male, but I doubt it. Probably a spawned-out female. He also caught an 18 1/2-incher that had a concave belly as if it had just lost weight. Maybe that fish was a male? He fished the same lake two weeks ago and caught a 19 1/4-incher like that. So who knows? The water temp two weeks ago was as low as 57 and as high as 61.
We did see a male definitely guarding a bed. And further along our course nearly all the way around the lake, saw another that I couldn't help but tempt. (I don't seek out the bothering of bucks on beds.) I had already cast, and my retrieve brought my fluttering worm right in front of the fish by a few feet. It promptly punched forward and sucked--I set the hook. I measured it at 17 inches and quickly got it back in the water to return to its defenses, although I hadn't witnessed any such action. Just a bass sitting still over a clear space on the bottom. On another occasion a couple of decades ago, my son watched a bass fend off intruders at its nest, put a worm down, and came up with a 17 1/4-inch male. But just how big males get in New Jersey, I don't know. My reading goes back almost six decades, and I've been informed for five of them that males are smaller.
Brenden also saw two bass swimming in a circle and exposing their flanks, probably spawning behavior he's seen elsewhere this time of year. (Some would simply assert that they're spawning, but critical thinking is so much more fun than making assumptions--unless you're playing at "making an ass of u and me," as one would ass-u-me.)
When Brenden told me 1 p.m. had passed, I felt shocked. The time had passed very swiftly. We did almost get all the way around the lake, but we still had a few hundred yards to go. I almost could have stayed out and completed the course; the fish had never stopped hitting. But I had told my wife we would go to New Hope in the evening. Since our bathroom is getting remodeled, we stayed in Lambertville.
We did go to New Hope. Visited Farley's Books. Ate dinner at River Salt. At Farley's I went directly to the philosophy section and first came upon Robert Pirsig's unpublished writings, now published under the title On Quality. Brian Cronk had recently finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Brian told me--a couple of weeks before I began studies of Nietzsche and Goethe--that Pirsig unites the Romantic and the Classical, which is exactly what I need to follow up on after those studies. I did read Pirsig's classic decades ago, and it will help to read it again soon.
I also came upon John Dewey's Experience and Nature. The 400-page work will be worth reading, I think.
More fishing yet to come this year. Looking forward to letting all else go.
Most of the pickerel we caught were small.
Over reached, but yeah, fat pickerel.
Slightly under 20 inches.
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