Bestow Value on the Adverse Brave the Weather

I should have photographed Oliver Round fighting his 18-inch smallmouth bass. He's had a breakneck busy schedule at work without much opportunity to get out and fish, so it's especially unfortunate he lost that bass, though his having hooked and fought it, complete with aerial display, was a lot better than not. 

Caught the smaller walleye and a hybrid on an ultralight-light power, 5 1/2-foot spinning rod I built from a St. Croix blank that put me back $70.00--just for the blank--years ago. Six-pound mono. What a fight! The big one fought very hard on my son's Speed Stick, but the walleye that I'm pretty sure didn't weigh four pounds--I put it back--put up a great fight on that light rod. "Maybe a catfish," I said at one point, as if 10 pounds was dragging. 

The hybrid was 17 1/2 inches.

That big one in the photograph above? It's the third five-pound, 15-ounce walleye I've had weighed in at Dow's. Unless any of the three weighed six pounds before I had them weighed in, I've never hit the six-pound mark! I was so sure I did today!

Raw weather felt good because fishy. There's no doubt the fishing was good today, and I'm sure because of the weather. I know people think wretched weather is that. No matter how you romanticize it--and I do romanticize it--there's an objective element in its being adverse. I don't argue against that. I just know--otherwise--that you can bestow value on things adverse. And probably live to ripe old age, too...if not live longer than you would had you not been brave. 

Even cigarettes. Jeez, I confess I used to smoke. They are medicinal. I never hear anyone say that or write that, but they not only put off anxiety--if just enough to get an edge over it that lasts a bit--they put you in a meditative space. They will kill you, if nothing else will, though it remains likely something else will. Of course, they complicate one's health, too, so whatever kills you might not have if you didn't smoke. But a lot of medicines are adverse for health otherwise, which is not to say, either, that smoking is wise to take up. I really do not recommend it. I wish cigarettes would go away, because I hate to see people hooked on them. It's better to find out what causes you anxiety and deal with it. It's even possible that the attempt to escape anxiety by smoking only elevates that anxiety. 

All I know is that since I quit three years ago, I've desired smoking very little. It makes me feel I should have quit at age 25, but of course, I really should never have smoked. 

Nevertheless, to attest to smoking's medicinal quality, I began smoking in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, aged 19, while suffering "the most severe manic-depression I have ever seen in all my 20 years of practice," according to the Director of Psychiatry of that Ivy League university hospital, Richard Brecht, who served as my doctor. 

My father knew whatever hit me was immense. He was not wasting a cent on anything less than great care. When Dr. Brecht told me about the severity of my mania, after I had come back around, he held my gaze unflinchingly, a big smile growing on his face. He was truly amazed, and I loved the man for loving his subject matter and admiring such survival of total annihilation. He started to talk about Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway--manic-depressives he admired, but this guy! Right in front of him in his office! 

But I took a cigarette from another patient on the hall and smoked it...Dr. Brecht never complained at all. Ah, smoking did help. But talk about things adverse! Many people think manic-depression is horrible, but if you yourself are manic-depressive, I doubt you really believe that. You suffer a lot of pain, but like they say, to suffer for the fish is a noble thing. Inherent to life itself is suffering, which might involve why the fish symbolizes spirituality, and to suffer all the more might be to move all the closer to life. To have more of it in greater abundance. Why else is suffering so closely associated with Christ? The artistic temperament overlapping with the qualities of illness facilitates the ability to romanticize manic-depression, and no matter what others tell you, they can't take that from you. Sturm und drang! Heavy weather, man!  

I had four days of fighting urges after I quit smoking. I just said no to them. Never bothered with any of the techniques. No drug. No nicotine patch. Just NO.

A little more on the great adversity, the best book on manic-depression I've read is Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament , but according to another book, Manic-Depression and Creativity , even Isaac Newton, the physicist, was manic-depressive, not to mention that the illness is that of the saints. (Often nicknamed the Divine Madness.) And rock 'n roll. Certainly.

The artists Jamison's book refers to are mostly writers and musicians, like poets Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, composers Robert Schumann and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Who wants to leave the world without letting his readers know just a little about him? I've got 30 years left, perhaps, but I don't want to pass on the opportunity when it arises. 

But more about the fish. They got caught on small herring. A point worth making. 

I always used to believe the big herring are better, but they told us at Dow's the small herring have been doing it. So we got a dozen-and-a-half small, a dozen large. The small ones proved to be better!

Besides fishing bait, I cast & cast a Binsky. Oliver cast a Sonic. No hits. Oliver did miss a hit along rocks on what I think was a Senko-type worm. My Yum Dinger only got pegged once by what I believe was a yellow perch. 

I did mark fish as deep as 39 feet, which really surprised me, but most were 20 to 30 feet deep. Water temperature 70 degrees at the surface, go figure with fish swimming as deep as 39 feet! All of the fish I caught came on no more than size 10 trebles as weight. The biggest came from the shallowest water, besides Oliver's smallmouth, which came from the same 15 feet or so. Don't know how deep the herring swam down otherwise.     

  

Released the smaller walleye

Teeth! They don't cut line.

Lake Hopatcong in the Fall

 

Narrowing It Down to the Big One

 

Our Lake Hopatcong ritual remains potent as the 20th fall of my getting on the water there approaches. I've invested good money in renting boats from Dow's. On the way to the Ledge or possibly Sunken Island, Jimmy Welsh swept by us in his center console. I was certain he headed for Sunken Island, and when I saw him there, I stopped short at the right-angle turn of the Ledge, immediately marking loads of fish. 

As expected.

There was no wind. That made putting out unweighted herring easy. With four herring lines over the side, I also put a nightcrawler out, by which I quickly caught a white perch. And then herring lines ran though rod guides. I caught and released a 16-inch hybrid, then caught the 4.8-pounder photographed later in the afternoon (below). It had died in the livewell. My wife and I will have it for dinner tonight.

I missed the hit from another hybrid. Setting the hook too soon may be better than setting it too late. After that, I maneuvered the boat with my electric behind an island with no sun on the water. Overhead, not a cloud in the sky.

Kevin quickly caught a smallmouth bass of about 14 inches on a nightcrawler. Got that worm close to rocks. I ended up catching two largemouths on a Senko, losing a nice one on that blue-purple worm and missing another hit. I got a smallmouth on a live herring and a nice black crappie on another of the same. 

I very much enjoyed throwing the Senko. (Actually a Yum Dinger.) Fly casting isn't the only way for fishing line to satisfy. Putting a worm--repeatedly--right where you want it to go is fun. And once and awhile a bass takes that worm. 

We had two dozen live herring and I felt determined to use them. I told Kevin about the time I caught a six-pound walleye on the Ledge at about 2:00 p.m. shortly before my son and I would leave, under a cloudless sky. Today, I had caught what were as yet my only two hybrids before the sun rose. The sun came up shortly after I weighed my big one. No necessity existed that would limit us to that catch owing to the conditions, but I wasn't entirely confident that the Ledge would work out for us. But we would mark fish. 

So, well, we should work for them!

A slight breeze had come up. Unweighted herring rode pretty high over fish marking as deep as 33 feet, as the boat slowly eased along the drop-off towards Halsey Island. Water temperature was 64 when we got on the lake; now it approached the mark of 70 where it would be when we left. Obviously, the lake had turned over quite a bit, though today's heat ran contrary to that. I did miss a hit, and immediately thereafter noticed big fish marking only eight feet down, but I'd say 95 percent or more of the fish were deep. 

I put medium split shots on our four lines. Some of our herring died, needing oxygen. They were getting down on bottom about 38 feet deep. So I looked for smaller shot, found some, and situated them about six feet up the line from the herring. The idea was to give the bait some mobility with the lighter weight, as well as the ability to swim above that weight, should it get down on bottom too deep.

The breeze ceased. A little fine-tuning of our position by use of the electric motor resulted in a couple of little 14- and 15-inch hybrids for me. We floated over the drop-off at 38 feet where fish marked at 31 to 33 feet deep. Where we had fished over 30 feet of water, no fish marked on the graph. Then the breeze picked back up. I repositioned with the electric and lowered anchor. We continued using the little shot, and Kevin caught a hybrid over 16 inches. I caught a smallmouth bass. Kevin caught a big bullhead by turn. 

And then I said, "Kevin." I had seen his rod tip lower. He wasn't paying attention, but it became immediately evident he had hooked a big one. The fish took off on such a sustained run, I wondered if he'd hooked a musky. Or, more likely, a big channel catfish. I would have to coach him. He's not very experienced and I knew the fish was no easy. "Pump the rod. Then reel as you lower the tip back down. Then pump again. Keep a bend in the rod." He kept reeling as the fish took drag, but his getting the pumping motion right enough was critical to getting the fish to the net. It took a long while. 

"Look at the size of that fish! It's eight or nine pounds!" I said, having just netted the biggest hybrid I'd ever seen besides a mounted eight-pounder and a huge hybrid I witnessed getting caught from shore at Spruce Run Reservoir. I weighed Kevin's at 7.73 pounds. Quarter pound shy of eight. It measured 27 inches long. 

4.8 Pounds

Not a bad smallmouth.

I do like catching bass on these Hopatcong outings.

They always appear pretty.

Hopatcong crappies can be pretty big.

Little hybrids fight hard too.

Trolled Hybrids
 

First Walleye

I didn't photograph the pickerel I caught, which came on one of the live herring weighted on bottom. A first after 15 years of fishing Lake Hopatcong during October., but not the only first today and much less significant. Other than that, I caught a small hybrid on herring and Brenden Kuprel caught a bullhead. All of our other fish came on lures, but another hybrid did take a herring and take off with it at high speed, peeling line off the spool, bail opened. By the time I tried to hand the rod up to Brenden at the bow, the line was spooled! I had an extra reel to put on the rod and rig for more of the herring. 

Brenden caught his first walleye today. That leaves me with lasting satisfaction, because we work together and he's talked about catching a walleye for years. Finally, we got out on Hopatcong in the fall when walleyes are vulnerable. He caught it on a Binsky after sunset. His big hybrid weighed five pounds, one ounce, according to a scale I once tested on a five pound bag of sugar. The weight was spot on. The light plastic grip I attached to the scale might have weighed an ounce or two. We didn't want to harm the hybrid's mouth. Caught it on a jig tipped with a dead herring fished about 30 feet down.

Most but not all of our fish hit about that deep. My second hybrid hit a Binsky in about 13 feet of water close to shore. Brenden even caught a yellow perch on a sizeable jig intended for bass among shoreline rocks. Water temp was 56 to 58, though, so the lake is all but thoroughly turned over, giving walleyes and hybrids reign of the depths. 

It was a comfortable day. As predicted, fog had moved in, but by the time I got up to Dow's later than expected, it had rolled back out. Temps were near 70 and it rained a little only at the end. We even enjoyed a little sunlight on the colors of the leaves. 

Walleye hit a Binsky.

Hybrid hit a Binsky.

Walleye hit a Binsky

 

Bait is Visceral When Visceral Needed

Actually, Kevin Murphy's pickerel catch gets first mention. He caught it on a piece of nightcrawler weighted on bottom by a large split shot. Can anyone imagine a pickerel picking up a piece of worm from the bottom? 

My heart was set on the Binky. I gave my arm a workout, but only to become more and more certain the fish were deeper than the 33-foot depths where I could work the lure. I've used outboards since I was 16, but I can't remember if the ones I owned at the shore had kill cords. (I do know my first outboard--a 1955 Evinrude I believe was the brand--did not.) Dow's outboards do have them, and I failed to realize that was why the engine wouldn't start. We stayed on that relatively shallow drop all morning and early afternoon, trying intermittently to get the motor to turn over! 

The water temp was 58. At 56, the lake should be completely turned over. That means oxygen was very deep today, so the fish had opportunity. 

I wish we had had more opportunity ourselves, but the three-pound, 13-ounce hybrid I caught was a good one. Kevin had a great time, too. A lot of sunnies, crappies, yellow and a white perch, and a rock bass caught. Also, a pickerel about two feet long engulfed one of my Binskys boatside, almost immediately cutting 15-pound fluorocarbon leader. I managed to lose two other Binkys to snags. 

That hybrid sure did awaken my interest in live herring. I was thinking of throwing only lures next Tuesday, but I've thought again. I guess a lot of fisherman think bait is nasty stuff, messy and not as sporting as playing lures. But especially when it gets cold--and 40 degrees this morning in the wind was cold--bait is visceral when visceral is needed. 

Enhanced Fishery

 

Walleye, Hybrid Striped Bass, Panfish

Kevin Murphy's first time on the lake, he drove to Dow's on Sunday, just so he could be sure of the route in the dark very early Tuesday morning. They told him Bruce wasn't going to take anyone out on Tuesday, there would be a big storm. Meanwhile, I was coming home from an afternoon in New Hope with my wife, and I didn't learn of  the storm until after we got home. So we met up there yesterday at 11:00 a.m. to stay until a little after sunset. 

I figured live herring would be the best approach for a beginner, and we also bought a dozen nightcrawlers, which kept Kevin occupied a long while. He caught nice-sized bluegills and a pumpkinseed. Tending herring lines, I felt a fish on one of them and insisted that Kevin take it; I had already told him we take turns on the bait lines, but he said, "Nah! I just feel good being out here. The fish is yours!" He wouldn't take the rod and I reeled in a walleye about 18 inches long. Unhooked, photographed, and released it. There I was, catching the fish when we bought the herring expressly in the interest of Kevin's getting acquainted. 

Later on, he caught a yellow perch on one of the herring rods, and then, after we moved the boat for the third time, something jerked one of the four bait rods forward violently--I immediately thought hybrid!--and I just grabbed the rod and set the hook. Since the fish was on and the rod was in my hand, I let the situation be as it already was defined and fought the small hybrid of 16 inches. I keep bails open, but even so, hybrids rush away with the bait so fast that anything hampering the line from flowing smoothly off the spool means the rod will jump.

I cast a Binsky bladebait repeatedly and eventually hooked a walleye of at least four or five pounds, lost at the net. The fish never took drag, but walleye never do no matter how big, Like other big ones I've caught, however, it stubbornly refused to come to the surface, and being a big fish, was hard to raise. A moment or two before Kevin would have slipped the net under the fish, the treble hook just gave out under the force I exerted.

We moved to a fourth spot where I put out the last herring and Kevin fished a dead one. I cast the Binsky, missing a hit and finally hooking something that came in easily at first. Then it began fighting and took off on the several powerful runs only a hybrid striper could exert. The fish measured 20 1/2 inches, a fair-sized bass. I worked the same water, maybe 25 feet deep, not letting the Binksy hit bottom before I began a yo-yo retrieve. I felt another hit, missed it, then hooked and caught a small white perch. 

The other hybrid and walleye came from water probably no deeper than 20 or 22 feet  The big one I lost might have been 15 feet down. Water temp was 62. The trees are still mostly green, although some color has definitely worked through a fair percentage of the leaves. It' s almost November, I would hope there's some color, but the lake is turned over only so deep. I never noticed a fish mark on the graph deeper than 21 feet yesterday..

Last year, when I fished the lake in October with Jorge, we finished the day by jigging Binskys. (Jorge did try other lures.) I think I never got hit, but I was into the exercise and considered coming out here the next season--this one--only to jig. That's how I feel again about nest year, and maybe we'll really limit ourselves to Binskys, besides nightcrawlers for some panfish. Kevin was talking about his learning how to jig a Binsky. One thing for sure. By anchoring in place to set bait, I've jigged the water thoroughly. It would be possible to jig spots all too superficially before moving on to others.

 

Kevin's pumpkinseed. I wanted to get a close-up.

Kevin also caught a nice white perch on one of the set lines.

 

Home Water

Eddie Prozer points to a rock and memories of fish caught come to him, He knows Culver Lake more thoroughly than most of seem to know any of our home water. And since he has lived on the lake for 20 years, home water lends a special appropriateness to the phrase.

I pulled into his driveway shortly after first light, grabbed my things, and a minute later, boarded his Ranger bassboat. It's in his back yard. An electric device holds the boat suspended over the water, which he lowered within another minute. We didn't race across the lake--that would come later--because curtesy given to sleeping homeowners is the rule. The lake, of course, is private and everyone is very mindful of the fact.

Not that the shorelines are really all that crowded with houses. It seems a little sparse compared to Lake Hopatcong. The pressure on the fish is less here, too, though today we didn't catch all that many. Eddie caught the smallmouth photographed, a nice crappie, and a pickerel of about 24 inches. I caught a 10-inch pickerel, another pickerel of 17 or 18 inches, and a largemouth of nearly 18 inches. 

Eddie estimated that bass at two-and-a-half to three pounds; I said maybe two-and-three-quarters. He guesses the weight of bass accurately, because he fished tournaments for decades, hundreds of his bass weighed in. So many fishermen wouldn't hesitate to claim my fish was well over three

While we fished the far side of the lake where I caught my two pickerel on a Senko near pads, I wondered about the hybrid stripers. They seemed somewhere far off, never to be encountered, but back on the near side where we got out of the wind, we saw a great splash-rise, and then another yards away. We cast thoroughly for nothing.

"They're gone a moment later," Eddie said.

Not long after, I heard that glorious sound of horse hooves on cobblestones. We saw a whole school breaking in the distance but near to shore. Shortly before I caught my largemouth, also on a Senko, surface erupted in casting range from the boat. I had another rod with a Chatterbait attached. Eddie threw a spinnerbait. A hybrid grabbed my Chatterbait, but with that same tentativeness I observe when trolling for them. More often than not, when a hybrid bumps a trolled plug, it nips it once again, and then absolutely slams it. My fish today didn't follow through. 

Eddie hooked up, though. The fish leapt, so I knew it was no hybrid but felt confused. Apparently, the smallmouth was cruising with the hybrids. In any event, it was on the herring they fed on. 

"The lake is like a bowl," Eddie said of its structure. Or lack of it. Maximum depth is 64 feet. There are some drops not as steep as Lake Hopatcong's. We fished a hump. "It's a quarter acre," Eddie said. "As big as a yard." And it rises to five-foot depths. A nice flat with some weeds. I asked if he's caught many fish on it. "Some," he said, scowling subtly. Another spot, the first section of shoreline we fished, he expects to catch five bass from on any visit. We did visit an extensive pad field. Eddie didn't want to get in close and work pockets because of the pickerel, though he was happy to catch his nice one and carries the attitude of enjoying the catch of any species, rather than none. Otherwise, weeds are rather sparse in the lake except all the way back beyond the bridge in the swamp. Water color today was on the dingy side. 

I'll be back. Maybe in the fall. Maybe next year. It all depends on scheduling. 

Word is, my son's visiting next week. He moves to Los Angeles next month. My wife and I are very excited. He began work yesterday for a company developing nuclear fusion. This is clean energy, if it works. The company claims it will within 10 years. Matt did critical work in the effort to better understand the Higg's boson, the "God particle." In the process, he developed his skills at artificial intelligence. I think he's working in a similar capacity, but don't clearly remember how he described it. Look's like Matt and I will fish Tilcon next week. 

Long ago, I described in this blog how I fall in love with places...then eventually abandon them. Tilcon may be falling by the wayside now. I bought the squareback canoe especially so Matt and I could fish the lake, and we did fish it plenty. Eddie tells me today was a very slow outing on Culver even for the summer, and that the fall is better. It will be interesting if I can make it. 

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From the Dock

 

May on Lake Hopatcong

So many years on Lake Hopatcong. Have been coming to Dow's regularly for almost 15 years. When you're young and feel things are getting old, you turn to something else; when you get to my age, there's nowhere to turn! You savor what's left of life and if you've lived well, it's enough. But knock on wood. I'm only 60. It could be interesting to see what I have to say another 15 years from now.

Oliver and I got on the lake at dawn. Heavy cloud cover had just moved in. It would seem promising, but although I never voiced this feeling, it just didn't feel right. Many times I said, as Oliver concurred, that the conditions were right for feeding activity: The clouds had just come. The water was 67 degrees. We were fishing just after daybreak. But he lake was dead.

We trolled my favorite lanes, not a hit. We put Senkos on spots in my favorite little cove, not a take. We trolled my favorite shallow-water cover for pickerel, bass, and crappie, not a hit. But finally, not long before the sun came out, I caught a 13-inch smallmouth on a Senko. Shortly thereafter, I boated another about the same size. And shortly after the sun did come out, we enjoyed our best trolling action: a yellow perch, a largemouth maybe better than 14 inches, and a 17-inch hybrid for me.

Oliver had also caught a hybrid, maybe 15 inches, on a retrieved paddletail. We caught some rock bass on the Senkos, too.

It was a successful day. There have been days when much bigger fish got caught, and days when many more got caught, and in any event, there's a need to make the connection. Once I caught that first smallmouth, I began talking more fluently. It was suddenly a different day. 

And today was a day for the shallows. Oliver suggested jigging deep a few times, and I won't deny it could have worked, judging the amount of fish we marked down there. Another thing we could have done would have been to have lowered live herring to them, but we bought no herring; even though Oliver had asked about that before we departed, I didn't want to mess with them. It's May. The water is warm (rose to 70). And although many times I thought I should be letting Senkos drop into 15-foot depths, and even tried that a few times, I'm waiting a few weeks or so before I start letting unweighted worms drift down below. 

Ironically, the pickerel came from the deepest water, 16 feet. But it seemed closer to dock boards it was underneath than to the bottom.

Oliver and his hybrid.

Oliver remarked that this slide seems custom made.

Big Hybrids

 

An Avid Sense for Where Fish Await

It was a treat to fish from Mark Licht's 18-foot center console yesterday. We put in at Lee's Cove, having met at 5:45 before first light, and then rode over to Dow's Boat Rentals, where I bought three dozen herring and a dozen nightcrawlers, feeling pleased Mark had told me he likes fishing the crawlers for the panfish. As expected, the herring Joe Welsh is netting remain small, but he told me plenty of walleye are getting caught, and that his brother, Jimmy Welsh, caught an 11-pound catfish on one of them the day before.

No fish in the boat before sun-up, resolve before the prospect of a slow day came early for me, and rather than give in to the desire to call it a short one, I kept busy on Mark's boat, going back and forth between checking on and tending set lines, and jigging a Binsky. I am a far cry from what I was five years ago, when I marked about four times as many dates over the course of a year in my handwritten fishing log than I do now. I'm too busy supporting my son's university studies, writing my book, and never flagging on my freelance writing and photography output, which increases in volume rather than subsides. 

Like most outings, in the middle of it, I came alive. That's not to say I didn't appreciate the early light, and Mark said he did, too, but it's to say it takes me awhile to fully get into the flow of experience, especially as I grow older, having forgotten where I came from and what I'm doing elsewhere, to fully accept the fishing. I credit myself for getting through some tough stuff and always ending up in a good mood. Even if I feel physical stress, I place my spirit ahead of that, and to my pleasure I find it truly in the lead.

I didn't inquire much into Mark's sonar system, though I am impressed. Even so, I confess an aversion to so much information, because I like to keep active with the rods, immersing my senses in the water, rather than referring to representations. I do use a simple portable graph and it's essential to positioning on the drops at a remove from the shoreline, though for what it's worth, my wife criticizes me on this as inauthentic. Mark's unit is basically a computer with full menu options, and if I'm not incorrect, it scans the bottom to a radial distance of 60 feet, when that option is chosen, which I did select by pushing menu buttons to check it out, although I didn't actively get interested in so many other details and regret not doing so. 

I can't remember a single Lake Hopatcong October or November outing--besides a November 17 and possibly an October 5, if that wasn't actually late September, when my son and I, or a friend and I, didn't catch at least one walleye. We've done this since 2007. I thought Mark's fish from at least 20 feet of water on a drop out in the main lake--I can't be fully certain the cast didn't go shallower--was a walleye, though maybe a bullhead, but it turned out to be a pickerel on a herring. Just about where I jigged a pickerel on a Binsky with Rick last week. Mark had also caught another pickerel on a crankbait from about 18 feet of water, that depth I'm sure of, though his crankbait would have run no deeper than seven feet or so. He also hooked a sunfish on a nightcrawler there, attacked by a musky! In awe, he saw the gill plates flush, and the full body. At the end of the outing, I suggested we try a section of Lee's Cove--a boathouse and a decaying dock--where myself and others have caught largemouths and a smallmouth on occasion in the past. Mark caught a largemouth on a Senko weighted by a slip sinker.

My catch amounted to two yellow perch and an 18 3/4-inch hybrid striped bass, the first hybrid Mark has witnessed. Unlike the other occasions when hybrids have been caught during the fall--those much fewer than walleye catches--this one was the only taker. It always seems when one hits, more follow, as the bass travel in pods and schools, but though I kept busy with the set lines on the same drop for another hour or so, nothing more happened.  

Sorry I didn't find a way to set this upright. After we docked at 1 p.m., Mark tried Brady Bridge from shore and caught this largemouth. This man seeks out fish with a keenly avid sense for where they await.

https://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2018/10/relaxed-beside-island-ordinary-life.html

Culver Lake Dock Fishing

 This shot was taken yesterday by John's mother. Kittatinny Ridge shadows glacial Culver Lake, the gap in between an interesting feature.

A coworker friend, John Lusk, invited me to fish Culver Lake from his mother's and stepfather's dock. We had a great day fishing a private lake off limits to any public access. I felt elated with gratitude for the opportunity, didn't have to hold back much, and in addition to two members of John's wonderful family, met his next door neighbor and a man named Eddie from the next house towards the back of the lake's 660 acres, a man reputed to be the lake's best angler for good reason. He's a former rodeo competitor who took up professional bass tournament fishing, winning some tournaments, too.

Upon meeting Eddie, I said, "For the past 20 years, I've wondered if I would ever get a chance to fish Culver. Now here I am standing beside the best angler on the lake."

He told me I might hook a pickerel, and before he finished telling me to use what he would get, he began making his way to a gear box at home. Two minutes later,  he handed me a white twister jig, saying, "Just drag that on the bottom."

I cast. Let sink. Began dragging bottom. Seconds later, I hooked a largemouth that jumped, showing itself to be about 11 inches as it shook the hook. "I told you so," Eddie said.

Until then, John and I had caught only a few sunfish and yellow perch. I began by hitting all the spots in range with a Senko, including a sunken rock pile in 10 to 15 feet of water. Bob, John's stepfather, told me the algae bloom hampering any visibility of things beneath the surface happened during the past week. John had bought three dozen nightcrawlers, and I didn't deny my own pleasure in using them. As John put it, "It's better than getting skunked."

Things would take an ironic turn later. But not by a big margin.

In the meantime, Bob fixed burgers and hotdogs on a grill; John's mother, Mary Grace, made an excellent salad and corn on the cob. We dined before a huge window on the lake, with the view of the gap in the distance that sold Bob on this particular house. Mary Grace told me it was originally built about 1830. That blew me away. I wasn't aware the lake had such history, besides the 12,000 years since the Wisconsin Glacier began to recede. She showed me a book on the lake's history, which I leafed through, and so now I know its attraction has served homeowners for a long while. She also showed me an article from Offshore about boating while the writer grew up on the lake, by a woman she knows who now freelance writes on boating.

After the meal and conversation, the sun angled light low. John said it was time. "This is when I always begin fishing here." Culver Lake boasts the state record hybrid striped bass at over 16 pounds. Hybrid stripers come right in close to the dock, the drop-off drawing herring in against this edge. We saw some herring dimpling before we quit tonight. Bob told me smallmouth bass sometimes push herring right in against the shallows of this slope. On one occasion, John fished a nightcrawler at sunset, right off the dock, and caught a 10-pound hybrid. I said, "Fishing is like photography. It's about light."

Fish took the nightcrawlers. I set the hook into something that felt big. We caught bluegills, yellow perch, a pumpkinseed, and white perch. John lost something really nice off the dock of a neighbor on the other side of the house.

Besides the nightcrawlers, we had killies. Those killies from Murphy's Hook House in Tom's River, when my wife and I went to Island Beach for the last time this year. (How long ago is that now?) I've kept them alive in my study. That is some study; the word is a synonym for office which artists and intellectuals use, my having learned the word as a very young boy from my dad, mine loaded to the hilt with both books and fishing gear.

I replaced the white twister on my jig with a killie, missing a sudden strike from something that stripped the fish from that hook, and catching what might have been a white catfish a foot long at sunset. Not too much later, I caught another catfish of the same description on a nightcrawler, enjoying the fight especially because--just maybe--it was a bass, but I felt sure it was a catfish. It would have measured maybe an inch longer than the one photographed.

All this ado about live bait. John never succumbed to killies. Instead, he rigged a Berkeley Power Bait worm with an inset hook and a little weight. Then he proceeded to catch two largemouths by working the worm up the slope, neither of the bass a foot long, but they were bass and they weren't caught on bait.
 

Largemouth


My New Website

Lake Hopatcong Trolled Hybrid Stripers

Funny how I feel entitled to experience as I imagine it coming. On the way up to the lake, I was in an annoyed, irritated mood, keeping it from my son, but thinking he could sense it plenty, irritated because I didn't get to bed until 4:00 a.m., and didn't wake until 10, the hour I had planned for us to hit the road, and even that plan somewhat of a compromise on my original dream of us having all day after Matt's freshman year at Boston University, though we would still get in eight hours. I have memories of us fishing during summer for eight, nine hours, when we forgot everything else and slowed way down on the lake, comfortable in 90-degree temps, sun on the forehead. Today would be a day just like that.

Well, for one thing, the fish wouldn't leave us alone. Besides that, yes, it was raining, very hard, and the temperature never got out of the low sixties. Soaked almost through and through, despite rain gear that is supposed to work, I was not only shivering by the end of almost five hours, I shook. Matt shivered.

I forgot my apprehensions while driving up, but while catching the first two or three hybrids, I felt too much my supermarket salesman self, as if that forehead of mine so worthy of solar heat was still fixed on the relatively monotonic process of moving product. Not that this is any complaint; I think I've got beyond unease and have embraced my job fully, but the natural world out there, that's a much larger reality than any sort of architectural structure, such as a supermarket that stands on given earth. A reality much bigger than all that is done behind any walls.

So greater dignity is appropriate outdoors.

Over the course of nearly five hours and 10 of these hybrid striped bass--the largest at five pounds, 15 ounces; Matt's biggest five pounds, 9 ounces, most of these fish fighting as if we hooked freighters on the Atlantic, all of them on various trolled plugs--we got well beyond where we came from, thus fulfilling some of that "all day" feeling, though we never sought out Woodport, a range of the lake we haven't fished, not even the Byram Bay area where we like to fish in the spring. I became aware of how the driving rain and chill affected me, but not with the observational clarity I tried to focus, so I just accepted that was no use, although I wasn't dysfunctional, just a little too short on patience for the first couple of hours.

And yet, it had happened. Ever since my son and I caught a number of nice hybrids on an October excursion in 2014, my biggest over five pounds, I've dearly wanted him to catch one at least as large. That trip nearly four years ago seems like yesterday, and yet the deep longing for my son's nice one has endured deeper than we can measure time. I wasn't in anything like an euphoric mood today, or even a relaxed state, but complacency doesn't describe it, either, so I give myself a pass; even though I wish I could have better celebrated the catch, there's time yet for this.

I remember not one, but a number of fishing excursions during my teens in steady rain, on one occasion getting to my destination eight miles distant on my bicycle, and then hiking a half mile or so, not a path, but through the water of the stream dammed at the pond I fished, air temperature at 50 degrees. Was this insanity? No. Unusual stubbornness, yes. I didn't know this then, but by the time I got home on my ten speed--after dark--I was in second-stage hypothermia. All I knew, I was delirious. Very.

So today I tried to compare, not very successfully, my ability during my teens and 20's to deal with weather extremes, compared to me now at age 57. I did conclude that it's harder to do at this age.

A great day. Even when I doubt, as I doubted today on the way to the lake not about the rain, but about the amount of time we might have and our opportunity to go deep into experience, we always seem to come through by getting out of the grind of the ordinary. And it didn't take a high mood for me to do this. We didn't fish until sunset, but going on five hours was fully plenty.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2012/05/lake-hopatcongs-enhanced-fishery-is.html

Such were the 1970's and this is Today

12:52 p.m. I had slid my "Dark Side of the Moon" c.d. into the player, switched the device to track 9, and prepared to log into Litton's Fishing Lines. I'm off to my job at 1:15, so I'll actually post later, as I've this and that to do yet. I don't know whether it's David Gilmour or Roger Waters who takes the vocal lead for "Eclipse," but I have been aware for many years of what to me seems the perfectly beautiful sardonic quality of that voice especially on this track. The final lyrical statement has a vibrant edge subtle as cosmic distance.

I don't perfectly recall if Thales first attempted to predict a solar eclipse some 200 years before Aristotle, but the ancients--or most of them, as science began to emerge with Thales--felt superstitious about eclipses and other celestial events. Opposite to the skies, I think of Christopher Columbus on the water, and much less of his men who spoke of mutiny against their Captain mid-ocean. I've wondered at Columbus's ability to lead those men, however, as anyone might think of Albert Einstein's statement, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." Obviously, Columbus held violence at bay. His ship was a rather small space to suffer an eruption of that. So as a matter of course in this respect, I don't fail to think of his men altogether.

The men seem to have hallucinated. That's an account I recall reading many years ago. Sea monsters. The men afraid out at sea so long. They got across thanks not only to Columbus's refusal to yield, but his working the problem out with men who wanted to end the voyage.

Quite a day today. I got the news. That phrase recalls on earlier post in 2012 on Burnham Park Pond, associated with General Knox of the American Revolution. I then cited the Steely Dan song of the title "I got the News" as a nexus between fairly distant history and me wrangling with the present,  but lets go south a little with respect to the Morristown region and focus on Spruce Run Reservoir and some results of the Howie Behr Hybrid tournament. It's not that I want to hide from you what I'm up to, but that 2012 was five years ago. Yes, it was quite the year for taking in nature's substance as if that myriad complexity divided into all sorts of goodies are "really good drugs," as my brother-in-law Iain--a first-rate amateur historian on the American Revolution--used to say. (I can't even begin to tell you outright how good these "drugs" really are.)

I got the news from Mike Maxwell sometime around noon, on my return from my physician--still working out this high blood pressure problem--and also from the bookstore, where I bought too many books--each of them Class A--for my wife's coming birthday, too many to bore you by naming.

Mike says 120 boats played the game. Twenty hybrids hit the scales. Think about that. Saturday & Sunday. All night, too. That is slow fishing. Winning weight was 12.46 pounds. Two hybrid limit. Mike told me the winners might have used live sunfish. I've never heard of that approach before.

I call that a big success. That many boats. Personally, I don't feel I missed out, having to work instead. I've enjoyed a couple of informal tournaments with iBass360 in recent years, but my days of competing honestly at fishing seem over. At ages 16, 17, 18, I competed with energy that never flagged until the very last tournament shortly before I left for Lynchburg College. A party the night before, I wasn't hungover in a painful way, because I was in the habit of drinking heavily. I think I could still smell the alcohol on my breath when the event was over after eight hours. Well before that day on the Salem Canal in Cumberland County, I had made up my mind. Becoming a tournament pro wasn't for me. Becoming a novelist was. But I had fished tournaments successfully, placing high in Mercer County Bassmasters rankings each of those years....and taking first place for the tournament on Spruce Run Reservoir when I was 17. I never forget the formality of being presented the trophy for that win. It was a real honor.

I still see myself fishing a  deep-diving crankbait. I rarely used the brand, but Bomber was the big one on my mind from yet earlier years of first getting acquainted through Field & Stream and Outdoor Life magazines at age 13. Until I was 12, I deeply involved myself with science, even though my miracle year at age 9--interest in zoology--was already over by a few years. Nine years old, I tried to originate ethological theory. There was nowhere to go with my interest. I was 10-years-old when I released it--remember this distinctly--feeling a twinge of guilt, but knowing I had to be part of society. Even so, science and I hung on until I was 12...and beyond. During my senior year in high school, I took Advanced Biology. My final project involved observing bass reproduce, and earned the highest mark in my class for that course. I never let science go, of course not.

While fishing tournaments, I cast over and over, never feeling repetition, because every move counted. My wins were always few and smallish bass when virtually none other got caught, but in fact manic energy tabbed these bass. I can't speak for other winners in the club in this respect, but I had a high-energy strategy that intended to grow, and until Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway led me out a secret passageway, I thought I might make it to high-paying scales. Some people think such diverse interests in one man's life--even a young man's--represent a conflict of interest, and though I can't understate the degrees of conflict I have suffered since boyhood--it was Hemingway who claimed a writer needs an unhappy childhood--I don't fall into the victim trap as if anything is wrong with a life as it in fact is. To think of a perfectly harmonious, peaceful life does recall numerous times I have loved just that. But after awhile, that gets boring. So I never have forgotten MCB's tournament on the Susquehanna Flats, a two day event, we club members staying at a motel, card game into the night. The winner boated a few bass up to four pounds, and at the scales the man gave me a long look. I felt both honored and slightly put off. He was about 35, somewhat of a tough guy. I was built. I lifted weights after school and it showed. My shoulders were broad and muscular. Biceps developed, as was my chest. The abdominal six pack wasn't very pronounced, because I didn't like sit-ups, though I did them. Just not as much as the weights. By late summer after senior year, I probably had some flab from all the beer. But I was nerdish, rather than tough. Honored at Susquehanna Flats in Maryland, because the man's gaze singled me out as worthy to show up. A little intimidated, because he seemed to give away that he was pissed at me as a young upstart. I'm no fool. I know that, potentially, there is grave danger in a look like that.

I wasn't even drinking age. But I behaved as if I was from the moment I joined the club. Such were the 1970's.

The most recent two posts were about Mike and Philippe. They had a great time. Their confidence hasn't flagged. Now with this third post on the Howie Behr, I indulge. Another past tournament on Spruce Run Reservoir I fished at age 18 drew members of the Bass Angler's Sportsmen's Society statewide. I didn't place in that one. I wrote about that in my post, "As if She would Forgive Me," and will leave behind a link to that post, but I don't need her forgiveness. Or if I do on some level I don't really know well enough about, that's a matter of all in due time. Maybe it's really the other way around. I suppose she needs mine. And if so, I need more of those harmonious perfections yet, knowing that none of it will count, without truly understanding a difficult issue. Maybe, when I wrote that post, I was wise enough to know just this I've stated months later, then playing out yet another tricky day by my craft and wiles.

I don't usually like the loud banging around of The Who about that.

Steely Dan I have much better respects for. An English major counts. I know this the hard way, which is not at all to say I don't have a great college education. The degree is not all an education amounts to. Anyone who thinks a degree is all a college or university education amounts to is a fool. But I don't say a degree doesn't count, obviously not. So what Steely Dan hears may be true. But I would feel honored if they would still be proud to know me. "I got the News," after all.



http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2017/04/as-if-she-would-forgive-me.html