Very Nice River Getaway

Being there was better than being here now. It's 9:31 a.m., and since returning home, we've unloaded, and I've edited my images.  Have to be at work at 1:00 p.m. and the routine feels sort of stupid after breaking it. I got up just after 3:45, and I'm not tired. Matt was up 15 minutes later, and he's napping now, having got to sleep later than I did. None of this morning was difficult, besides the first three or four minutes of getting up.

We drove out to Neshanic in the dark, getting on the river not very long after first light. No canoe this time, we waded my favorite stretch, beginning with topwater plugs, each of us catching an average stream bass pretty quickly. I hooked a better fish and had it on for a couple of seconds, then got hit when I pitched the plug back where the smallmouth had turned, missing this smaller bass. We cast some wide slow eddies before I got a feeling about the head of the hole where current plays with the surface. It was very calm out there, maybe 68 degrees, and the water felt about the same temperature. We wore wading boots and shorts. I forced a cast to make my little eighth-ounce plug touch down neaer the top of the roils and a bass almost immediately sliced into the offering. I was on.

"Nice one!" I announced. The drag ratcheted as the bass curved away and down into the deep hole, maybe eight feet deep. For maybe several seconds I watched the line rise and felt the fish coming up as I made sure I had a tight line for the leap. Glorious. The smallmouth appeared to be just about three pounds as it contorted wildly, throwing the hooks.

We switched to Senkos. Meanwhile, the river had risen five or six inches as water must be getting pumped out of Spruce Run Reservoir. We noticed how badly off color that water was and resolved to leave just as the sun came up. I never do well on this river when fishing dingy water, but the topwater plugs worked before too much light got on the water.

We drove to the North Branch. A spot where Matt sighted a 20-inch smallmouth that followed his worm the other day while he fished with a friend. Here the water was a little too off-color for the way I like it, but we fished very persistently. Matt hooked and lost a smallmouth he estimated as 16 inches. Later he crossed the river and fished a very slow pool, catching three small largemouths. I had missed a few hits that must have been small bass when I saw a rise and put my worm right on it, got hit, missed that, then pitched back to the same place, got hit and played the 13-inch largemouth photographed below.
 

No?

"I'm not a bassman at all," I claimed in the Providence post. Huh. It talks about reservoirs and big bass and how I could catch one. Days later, I catch a seven-and-a-half-pounder at Merrill Creek Reservoir, and feel stunned and sort of wondering why I feel that way. For more reason than the preceding post, but it is true that this blog is a process that involves the real world.

Shortly after I caught that lunker, I felt converted, even though I had forgotten all about the Providence post written shortly previous. No bassman at all? I caught some kind of answer to the contrary of what I had asserted.

You can see the quizzical look of an unconscious poker face on the Merrill Creek post where I'm holding the fish. None of the photos my son got of me show me breaking out in much of a smile, at least not loose and relaxed, I was so dumb-founded. The poker face wasn't intended as such, but later I thought I look as if I'm answering back to the bass community who might have doubts about my prowess stuck on little three-and-a-half pounders, but better than that. It reflects back on me. My body language is saying, "I didn't mean to fool you about my denial, but I went ahead and did anyway."


http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2018/05/providence-thats-another-big-idea-to.html

North Jersey Outdoor Recreation

As a boy, Matt found 10 of New Jersey's 16 snake species in the wild, a couple of lizard species, a number of turtle species including the rare bog turtle, and numerous salamander, frog, and toad species. Not to mention out-of-state reptile and amphibian finds. I awakened a deep desire to reconnect him with this passion, and today, about a month after I thought of going, we gave it a try, but he couldn't quite remember where the Delaware Watergap National Recreation Area spot for salamanders exists that New Jersey Audubon led him to about six years ago. Lots of salamanders. He photographed many. One of the species he found we're uncertain about as to its identity, so I particularly wanted to encounter some of these. His best guess about where: Van Campens Glen. So I suggested we bring fly rods, too. We found a spot he thought might have been the place, but the ground was too dry and we found nothing, so I doubt this is where, but maybe the spot has changed.

Meanwhile, we fished a large deep pool beneath a waterfall. Very thoroughly using various beadhead nymphs. With and without small split shot. Another fly angler showed up, who told us he regularly catches 8- to 10-inch wild  browns there, his biggest 13 inches, some wild rainbows too. I invited him to fish with us, but he wanted to go on upstream to a larger waterfall. I kind of wanted to see him in action, but I fish a waterfall pool on the upper North Branch that never fails to at least yield a hit from a wild brown. We got no hits today. And we later figured these two pools of Van Campen's Brook get a lot of pressure. Today a weekday, in the middle of the afternoon someone else showed up to fly fish. You can just imagine how many times the trout in these pools get caught and how reluctant to hit flies they become.

We stopped at my favorite Delaware River spot on the way out. Poxono Island. We basked in the sunny heat a few minutes and that felt good. We didn't fish at I-80 bridge, either, where we've caught a lot of smallmouths wading in the past. Maybe it was hunger that drove us on. We took 94 "into town," finding farm fields instead, but curving through Hainesburg with no deli or stores along that short tour of a hamlet I was seeing for the first time, passing a bridge over the Paulinskill where the river looks very inviting...we drove on. Dales Market in Blairstown served us an Italian hoagie, trail mix nuts, M&M's to add to the nuts and raisins, and a coke and green tea.

When we pulled up to our favorite smallmouth spot--big ones here--and finished eating, I walked down, glanced at the water, and it informed me we were probably there to give our respects. Not because anything specific was amiss about the river's condition. It was just an impression I got. A glance like that always seems to tell me everything. We fished about 20 minutes and Matt caught a little nine-inch smallmouth.

On the way to Saffin Pond--the plan was to fish sundown there--we talked about a possible part of the day's plan we had let go. My idea was to hike up the ridge and check the copperhead den. Get photographs. We haven't been there for five years or so, and I would like to get back, but we began to realize the full area deserves more time and exploration. Neither of us could remember searching the wetlands for salamanders, years ago. There were so many varieties of frogs. We observed these instead that day a year or two before I began blogging in 2011. So maybe next summer we'll spend an entire afternoon up there.

We got to Saffin Pond as light was climbing towards the tops of trees to the east. Matt caught a largemouth a foot long. I caught four largemouths, lost another. I measured my largest: 18 3/8ths inches. All on weightless worms. Three of the bass hugged tight to wood in the water near the bank where depth gathers pretty quick. I spotted a pocket in sparse shallow weeds to catch the biggest. Another pocket yielded a small one of about a pound. All released of course.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2011/09/appalachian-trail-white-lake-and-tilcon.html

23 1/4-Inch Merrill Creek Reservoir Largemouth Bass From Shore

Most magazines take first-use rights, so well after a better photograph, in which the bass looks bigger, clears the legalities, I'll post that photo here.

My wife had never visited Merrill Creek Reservoir, so I offered her the opportunity, along with our son after he got off work today. We left Bedminster around 6:30 p.m.. It was too late for a hike, but we sat down on a nice "beach," as a passerby called it. I sized up the situation. To our right, sparse flooded timber, apparently open water in front of us. I reasoned that bass will frequent virtually any shoreline, and this stretch in front of us really wasn't bad with that wood in the water nearby. I cast my weightless Chompers far as I could and imagined it sinking through 20-foot depth, sunlit up top, nice and dark below, and then I propped my rod and reel on my camera bag, bail opened, lay back on the gravelly sand, closed my eyes and enjoyed sun on my skin.

Pretty soon, prompted by how it felt odd to be under gravity's power, I had a sort of weird vision about how mass and gravitation might "really" work. I started mumbling to my son, who had decided to lay back next to me, my son who knows everything physics, of course, as a physics major, this a Golden Opportunity for him to condescend to his dad. He didn't convince me about energy as the fundamental reality. "But energy has being," I said. I had seen gravitation in my mind's eye--a force--as merely following form. Stuff did not just glom together here to form this planet, on which I so perfectly lay back to take in the sun. The form preceded the existence. I was thinking that form sort of drew the stuff here. That would be gravitation, but only in the literal sense. I was really thinking of space itself as somehow formal. But "space" makes no sense without things, which to my mind begs a question about what space might be, not in terms of things like this planet, which has not existed here forever, but instead in terms of information that somehow precedes what comes about and gets established as reality. To put it simply doesn't explain anything, but of course, this planet never could have come into being, unless it possibly could come into being, before it actually did....

I didn't get further into it with Matt. After about 10 minutes of feeling really good about sandy gravel on the back of my head as implying gravity and certainly more than that somehow or other, I lazily sat up, reached to check my line, and for a moment was a little confused, because it seemed tight. Yeah, I had sized up the situation as possibly yielding a bass, but we came here to show Matt's mother the place, not actually get a fish on, and to have just walked up to the first spot we came upon at a 660-acre reservoir, 210 feet deep, that just isn't likely to yield fish.

I stood and found a fish was on for certain, made sure that hook was set, and felt that whatever this fish was, are there carp in Merrill Creek Reservoir? carp do hit plastic worms, it was pretty big, and now it was rising to leap, and when a largemouth came completely out, "eight pounds" flashed in my mind. I loosened the Penn's drag a little, because this bass was going to run, and it eventually did, once it saw the shore. Before it got near, it leapt once more, seeming almost as fat as long, and I was astonished a fish as overweight as it looked could clear the surface.

Hook secure, though, I subdued it, and Matt grasped the lower jaw not by thumb and forefinger, but with all four fingers and thumb curled underneath. She measured 23 1/4 inches with a fat belly, so correct me if I might be off a little about the weight, but I judged seven-and-a-half pounds. That secured hook actually caught on the upper lip, so I'm very sure this bass took the worm off bottom in the dark, after that worm sat there on bottom for about 10 minutes. And it must have hit about the moment I decided to get up and check my rod.

Sun ducked under the trees and we soon left. The gate closes at sunset.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2014/05/lunker-lunch-5-pound-round-valley.html

Just bought a Lew's Speed Stick

Just bought a Lew's Speed Stick (spinning) and Ardent Bolt spinning reel. Lew's Speed Stick I seem to remember from way back when I constantly read Bassmaster magazine as a teen, so I identified with the offer on Ebay immediately. As fortune would have it, I spent the next half hour scrolling down lists of specs on other rods, and felt convinced nothing else would serve better, and though I was tempted to spend some more on a St. Croix bass rod, since St. Croix is my favorite brand and gives me a lofty feeling, I just couldn't deny Lew's, not after somehow or other riveting upon the brand so many years ago.

It's medium-heavy. Seven feet. The other day on Tilcon, I horsed a nice bass from weeds and felt the near-breaking point of my medium power St. Croix. I've owned this rod since 2000 and there's no way I will let it break. So I need Lew's. At least I think this one is heavy enough. It's rated up to 14 pound test, which isn't really much; I'm using 15-pound Power Pro on my St. Croix, and that's why it almost broke. I want #20 on my Lew's, and for all I really know, it may break, but I've muscled a lot of good bass on my lighter rod, so I feel halfway confident the Lew's will work out.

Tilcon Lake is just too weedy and the possibility of a really big bass is just too great.

I own an offshore jigging rod with a light tip--I was warned against its pier use when I tried it there--and can you believe that rod is rated up to #100?

If Lew's breaks, I'll up the ante. But I'm thinking of a very extreme situation that will never happen, I guess. We shall see..

Something I Don't Want to Lose

More than a year ago, On the Water magazine did a great job of combining this GoPro shot I got of a Round Valley Reservoir brown trout with a shot I took in the Ken Lockwood Gorge, by using Aperture-Priority mode on a DSLR to blur fast-moving water. The finished product looks as if a giant brown turns for a lure in a pool immediately below that blur effect.

So I went online again to look at GoPro options, found a Hero 3 Silver like my old device for $69.00, found low prices for underwater housing and extension tube, and balked before buying. I went outside, sat down, and thought it over. For one thing, I had decided earlier in the day I discovered it lost that it was the worst investment I've made with money earned by writing. $325.00 plus whatever I paid for accessories, and after six years, I've got two still shots from it published, which isn't really bad at all, considering how limited space is in magazines; it's just that cost/benefit doesn't work in this respect.

I decided it does in more personal ways. I couldn't escape the fact that just a handful of family footage I've taken is really valuable. If I were to shoot endless videos, we would never hit play for most of them. I also simply want to see a really good shot of a largemouth bass taken through Tilcon Lake's clear water.

Before I came back in minutes ago, I decided the least I can do is clean up the back seat area of my Honda. I looked there very thoroughly, but maybe not just enough. I resolved to pull myself out of bed early tomorrow. Then I sat down here, pulled my lap top over, and felt interrupted for a second. One of my telltale hunches. I looked over the armrest of the sofa I'm sitting against. No, nothing down there, as I had checked a dozen times. But wait a minute. What if...I reached underneath the sofa edge, and felt a familiar feeling, the foam-plastic grip of my GoPro extension tube.

It's here complete.

Buzzbait and Worm Action for Bass and Pickerel

My old habit involved preparing the night before for the day's fishing but things don't necessarily go south for entirely bad reasons. I got up this morning, though, and just couldn't find energy to really want to fish today, but I consigned myself to loading each item, along with the help of Matt, and even as I turned the ignition key shortly after 12:30 p.m., I generally rued the loss of my GoPro as we packed out from a recent Hopatcong outing. Two years ago I got footage of a largemouth, and though the still shots didn't come out well, clear water Tilcon Lake really makes the malformed images striking. Naturally, I wanted to try again. Suppose I will, once I buy another.

Once everything was in motion, headed up U.S. 206, my nasty state lifted and I felt all this would be worthwhile. About 40 minutes later, we got to my friend's house where I'm hiding my stash from the condo association and loaded that stuff on top of the Honda for the world to regard. We got to Tilcon, and I found that one of the cart tires I had just inflated back in Bedminster was about 30 % deflated. So, what will happen when we would load 250 pounds or more of canoe and accessories?

If you've ever heard a tire rupture clean and the air hiss, you would think no cobra can do it better.

The good tire.

The bad tire had simply coughed out. In the middle of discussing the apparent need of loading back up and trying the back of the lake, where the walk in is fewer yards but very, very steep, I asked Matt if he could just carry the 70-pound marine battery the two football fields' distance. I would carry a load, and then we would try the deflated wheels for the canoe with light stuff in it.

The wheels got us there. We had positioned the cart near the rear, so Matt had a lot of weight in front to carry. He had gum surgery yesterday. Warned about heavy lifting causing blood pressure to rise.

No matter. I'm his father after all, so my advice is pretty good.

I pushed us away from the bank with a paddle, clicked on the electric, and found the battery was low. It's not just my stressful job, I was explaining to my son, it's an entire shift of my habits. I told him I can't wait until I'm deep into writing the trout book. I had worked for about six months on a 24-page essay I hope to get published in one of the world's top literary journals, and although I toggled between that and many other writing projects, that big essay was always there to get involved in by forgetting everything else. The feeling of compensation for a gutsy hard day working in the supermarket was exquisite, and the same sort of feeling accompanies writing about trout.

You don't consciously intend to overlook well-established habits, such as charging the battery two days ahead of schedule; they just get forgotten along a way that's become less deliberate.

I ruled out pressing back to the rear of the lake. "With this headwind, we might never paddle home," I said. Trolling speed for elusive Atlantic salmon was too slow, as we approached a spot only some 900 yards distant from base, but I caught the bluegill photographed above out over water 32 feet deep distant from relative shallows, on a Phoebe.

Force of habit: We fished one of our two favorite spots hard, me using worms. I tried a 12-inch Mann's Jelly Worm, having taken advice from an article in On the Water magazine, and after 20 minutes of focused fishing, I switched to Chompers eight inch. I had said, "I can't quite feel I'm fully in earnest." How could I be after seven years of nothing but Chompers and Senko-type worms?

I had given the big worm a shot. The habitual choice was no hit with anything, either.

"Looks like rain," I said. It kept on looking like rain, and after we moved around a tight corner and over the 10-foot depths of a weedy flat, I finally got the day's first good idea, thanks to my son. Water temperature was 71. Almost perfectly optimal for largemouth bass. Low bunchy clouds overhead looked as if they passed over us at silent movie speed. I voiced the situation, "Wind is really blowing."

Matt was throwing a spinnerbait. You could tell the wind was blowing by how far he could cast in a certain direction, if not by any other means. "Might be good...for a buzzbait…" The way he said this tentatively emphasized value in the possibility. As if a buzzbait might cause some special change in the way things really are.

"How many buzzbaits did you bring?" I had forgotten my topwater case. Nothing was more stupid than that omission.

"Two."

"Pass one on."

Big and black. On the fifth cast, I had a pickerel on that came off.

It's not just a chemical reaction. Brain science is way too immature to really know what it talks about, if it says serotonin, or whatever other neurotransmitter, functions only in an individual brain, unrelated to objective possibilities in the environment that brain inhabits. There's a whole ecology between a good human brain and natural environment. But I always make this distinction: I didn't know we were on to something. But I did know that hundreds of other times I've felt like I felt after I lost that pickerel...those hundreds of other times led to gain. Some people just don't have brain chemical spikes like I enjoy. "Some are born to sweet delight/Some are born to the endless night." And that's a legal quote. Jim Morrison stole it from William Blake. I take it from Blake. My fish sense lit up. Here we go.

"Maybe back in those shallows," Matt said. He put on a yellow buzzbait just a little smaller. We moved 10 yards inward. Soon I caught a chunky 14-inch largemouth. Minutes later, Matt wailed a cast--you don't actually hear the line peel, you imagine that part--to a weedline, and something huge exploded on that buzzbait. I heard the POW! without seeing it just then, but even when I looked, water flew wildly about as if a hippopotamus got stocked along with those half-real salmon. Missed that one, but he soon caught a pickerel. And then something pretty big slurped his lure, not getting hooked, and one second later, another slurp. I was onto a good fish. The bass would have taped out at nearly 19 inches, but I didn't have Matt photograph it by use of my wide-angle lens, so maybe that's about how big it looks in the picture below, instead of five inches longer. Looks about 18 to me, but it was longer than that.

Matt was talking about all the acreage around us, but my fish sense was already sagging. If that's manic-depressive, it sure is prophetic, because we fished those buzzbaits all over about five acres, or so it seemed, before the sun came out 20 minutes after all the action had faded. That's something else I notice time and time again. Fish seem to sense what's coming and behave accordingly. Seems to us absurd for them to fear the sun, but not to them.

And then we lost a couple of hours or more, just not getting it right, trying another favorite spot completely barren, trying a shoreline downwind of that. We went back to the edge of that five-acre flat, anchored, and I felt like slowing way down. I remembered Lake Hopatcong years ago and how rewarding fishing live bait. I was fishing a Chompers. A bass took after fifteen minutes or so. The flat is so full of thick vegetation, and the bass like to get in so thick you might not get them out. I set the hook and felt powerful muscular pulsation, then I felt so much weed mass I couldn't budge the bunch. Finally the weight gave, but with no bass on the line. I caught a pickerel while working that worm very slowly through the weeds. Then I caught the weedy bass photographed below. That too I couldn't budge where it had got to; I couldn't budge it before my St. Croix almost broke. Action seemed to slow; I felt possibility in another sort of cove between two weed edges. We eased over to it, and I had a big bass on right away, line catching on weeds, and during the disturbance of that connection made suddenly and jarringly irregular, that bass got off.

Matt almost caught a pickerel on a Jitterbug. Neither of us have ever caught a fish on that lure.

We got off the lake about 45 minutes after the sun went behind hills, well into dusk, and the cart with the flat tires kept working its way to the square back of the canoe and past the edge of the canoe's total length. We had to haul the thing out. Matt kept remembering football practice, he told me later. My participation involved compressing very bad discs in my lower back, a certifiably insane exercise, and I wondered, without any solemn emotion, if financially the best bet was to leave the canoe there and say the hell with it; I won't be due for back surgery.

The clock is swinging its way towards 3:00 a.m. now, and my back feels as if it's OK, so, as I felt when I committed myself, I think that haul was really no mad exercise. We went to my friend's house, pulled the bear steeply uphill into dark woods, my headlamp essential, the intense light provoking no one to fling open and window a fire a pump-action shotgun at its source, and after all was done, we got home at 11:00 p.m. sharp.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2016/07/new-jersey-salmon-lost-and-largemouths_89.html