Crouching for Trout

Told myself recently today would be a day for catching up. No fishing. Ha! I finished a query I needed to write at 1:30 pm, after spending more than an hour-and-a-half before this at cleaning up my laptop. As my reward for good work done, I rode out to Scherman-Hoffman Preserve and signed myself in for some Passaic River fly fishing. I was notified I had to be out by 4:45, this at 3:12, so I briskly hiked directly to my favorite pool.

I got fully absorbed in the fishing right away, crouching with my Simms-covered seat in the water, but I caught no trout. I caught a silver shiner, the same species I use as bait, amazed at the three-incher's gumption at striking a size 16 beadhead. Soon I hooked something else small that got off, and then later caught a five-inch chub that fought like it might have been a little brown or rainbow, both species reproducing here in the big river's headwaters.

I can dig this sort of fishing. The particularity by use of my little six-foot, two-weight TFO involves plenty of reward for developing skills, which have paid off in the past, even though, so far, none of the trout have measured more than nine inches long. I have spotted them in this Bernardsville flow about a foot long in the past.

New Jersey offers a lot of opportunity for wild and native trout. It's no wonder they don't get much pressure, given the size of most of them, and relatively sparse populations for the most part, but I like the feel and I will be back, connecting at least to my own practice at gaining on some success.

On the way home, I swung over to the North Branch Raritan at AT&T, fishing persistently, wading across the river and upstream after fishing by the exit bridge, getting a beadhead deep in a nice pool with strong and deep current leading into it. I felt a nice trout had to lurk there, and I kept trying to get a hit, feeling as if maybe I could do this for a hundred years and nothing would happen, but who knows.

https://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2018/01/wild-and-native-trout-in-small-high.html 

Kittatiny Ridge Frames a Good Mood

On Millbrook Road, accessed by first navigating a series of roads new to my travels, we approached Kittatiny Ridge. Trish and I got a very clear look at the face of it. The walls of schist or whatever looked smaller in the distance than they are, but still appeared prominently, distinctly off-white like marble. I said, "Matt and I climbed that ridge from the bottom when he was seven-years-old." The vertical elevation from the start of the Mount Tammany trail to the summit is 1200 feet. I think the Rattlesnake Ridge trail Matt and I climbed is about the same ascent. At the top, there's a pathway no more than four feet wide between a gigantic boulder face, and an edge over which distance drops about 900 feet to treetops and rocks. I felt very nervous walking that. My young son showed no fear at all, once standing right at the edge and looking down as frankly as had he looked at a floor. I was stunned.

Further on Millbrook Road today, views from the ridgetop felt thrilling. And after the last view passes, descent is steep and swift, Millbrook Village appearing on the right quickly. No event held by the park service today, we came to hike further up along Van Campens Brook, further than we had walked several years or more ago. I slung my camera bag on my left shoulder and carried my two-weight TFO fly rod with my right hand. We did work our way further up the Donkey Hollow Trail, but I remember last time somehow finding a trail that follows the brook closely. This time that wasn't evident. I did manage to fish the spot photographed not long after we left the village, and also cut off the trail far upstream, making sure moss on stones I braced my boots against didn't slide under them as I worked my way downhill to the water. This second spot was a nice hole, bottom four or five feet deep perfectly visible, but I felt as if I had imposed on the fish there, fish I suspect are present but had dodged me and my bead-head nymph.

Later, when I unloaded gear into the trunk, a man a little older than me came up and asked had I caught any. We launched into an informative chat about the fishing, his experience and success a lot more than mine up there. "You have to approach them with stealth."

"I did feel I imposed on them," I said. "Do you crouch?"

"Oh, yeah." And he said he wears camo. He kept mentioning the trout's weakness for bead-head nymphs, that they like the reflective gold surface on the tungsten. He wasn't fishing today, but he's done quite a lot up there.

The hike wasn't for the fishing. It was for my wife. And mainly, we came up here for that hike and for dinner at Walpack Inn. As events proved out, Walpack Inn was the main reason, but before we parked among hundreds of other vehicles and carried books into the restaurant, anticipating a wait, we visited Roy Bridge again, where I didn't fish, but did perform a productive photo shoot.

The view of the ridge as we traveled back on State Park 615 to the restaurant felt grand. Green tone recently gave way to yellow on the rusty side of the color spectrum, I could tell. Down here in Bedminster, the color tone is still predominantly green. We got a table without waiting. I felt utterly amazed, as we were led to it, at the size of this place. Where do the dozens of employees come from? It must be 45 minutes to the nearest gas station. Maybe that's hyperbole, since Layton isn't far, but Layton is a hamlet. Despite a lot full of vehicles, getting a table was no problem, the place is so big, and the food was fantastic. I had prime rib, Trish a strip steak. Each of us got baked potato with sour cream and horseradish. Doc Joe's (think it is) Hard Apple Cider is so fresh it reminds me of a Class 1 trout stream like my favorite Dunnfield Creek. The apple pie with ice cream was a huge serving for each of us. And as we ate, aside from us, a huge picture window admitted a full view of Kittatiny Ridge whenever we turned to admire the mountain.

We took a walk behind the building towards the ridge before we left. It's certainly not the highest mountain on the east coast, but to deny it if you haven't taken its challenge is cheap. And if you were to deny it and then take it's challenge, it might not be safe...

https://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2016/05/hainesville-pond-little-flatbrook.html

https://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2014/05/blue-mountain-lake-largemouth-bass.html

Savage Summer Flushed Clean

As we departed our cars for the river, Pat asked if I expected us to catch any. I said, "I would be surprised if we didn't." Such is my belief in this river and the stretches we fished, but if reality never checked my presumptions, I would get all too full of myself very quickly. We found the South Branch running high but very clear. So clear and cold my first impression told me the bass weren't going to come easily. Pretty soon, I figured they weren't going to come at all, but part of the game involves narrowing down where those fish might be, in spite of their refusal to let you know for sure.

The edges and shallows where bass struck last I was here weeks ago were empty. No hits, and by wading these areas, we sighted nothing but a little smallmouth about five inches long. Pat waded across the river and examined the edge on the other side, the first of any of my parties, including myself, to do this. He sighted a carp about three feet long and nothing else but rocky ledges and bottom. Eventually, I crossed the river and though I distinctly saw bottom five and six feet deep, no fish made themselves evident at all. My conclusion that the bass must be down in about eight feet of water hugging bottom felt all the more certain. The current moved powerfully through these depths, but right at bottom it doesn't move much. We probed that bottom repeatedly, but nothing was interested.

Cold and clean, the water gave us no doubt fall has settled in. Trout water, but bass will still hit sometimes. Today we fished the middle of the afternoon under sun and clouds, but a lot of sun. Last November, I came here with Steve Slota at daybreak, frost crunching under boots, and I caught a smallmouth about a foot long on my second cast. The magic hour early or late makes a difference. It is possible water somewhat off color that morning did too, although I'm more under the impression that the clarity it has now would be even better for catching bass.

There was an impressionistic feel to the place. I've never before experienced it like this. Seurat could have filled a canvas with dots as if things weren't quite real in the hard-edged ordinary sense, and yet every time I looked down through that clear water at bottom--whether soft, gravelly, or rocky--I felt nature had flushed the savage life of summer clean, as if all that is left are the elements without the waste life inevitably leaves behind.

We drove downstream where trout got stocked weeks ago and fished salmon eggs for whatever still awaits in the currents. Not a hit. But I got absorbed by use of my three-and-a-half foot wand, not doing any more magic than controlling the drift. That's a matter of allowing the egg to ride with the current near bottom, while keeping monofilament nylon fairly tight so a strike can be detected and hook set. Pat was into it, also. I thought of springtime ahead, and I realized that perhaps the most beautiful thing about fishing in April, before trees green and confirm the fact of spring's presence really here, is the expectation.

What a Try for Trout

Plan was to wake up, pack up, go trout fishing. I didn't care to go at all, and instead of making myself do it, I respected our mutual endeavor and gave myself a break, rather than put the kibosh on what I always want to go well.

Sure enough, by early afternoon while I continued to struggle with an essay I will submit to a high-end fishing magazine, and felt frustrated over losing time to query yet another, I began to feel like going. Trish and I had plans to go over to the Lamington for a photo shoot as the sun would get low, but I had plenty of time to scoot over to the local AT&T stretch and dip some salmon eggs.

I got over there, reached to open the door, and realized I had left the salmon eggs in the fridge. "Goddamnit!" I drove home, fetched them, and soon worked the current under the exit bridge, polarizers revealing very nice depth, though I sighted no trout hugging bottom as I began a process of covering water swiftly. I knew there was no point of continuing to cast when I didn't feel this would yield anything, but not only do I trust my fish sense very tightly, I plainly saw no fish. I imagined there might be a few camouflaged, but I had my doubts. Finally, I settled on the fast water below the entry.

Standing in front of four foot depths, I realized I needed to add a couple of barrel swivels to my snap to get the egg near bottom. First, I took the safety pin holding swivels off my vest, clumsily emptying the prong of all eight or nine swivels onto the leaves at my feet, recovering only two of them, but I got them on the snap...in the process losing my leader and hook. So next, I got involved in the frustration of tying a new leader by the use of my bad eyes. Those size 14 hooks and ultra-thin two pound test are not easy for me now. After long minutes of intense frustration--all I wanted to do was come and have an easy go at this--I found that somehow I had broken off the hook I had tied to the fluorocarbon. So I tried again, and this time I completely screwed up on the loop knot, finding--after I tied a second loop on a leader that was about three feet long, not half that length as I had misjudged it--that I had indeed tied a successful loop in the first place, which was about a foot from the hook. So there I was with two loops, and when I tried to break the leader so it would measure about a foot long, I destroyed that first loop I had tied. Finally, I ended up with a leader attached to my snap about four inches long. Absurd. But it would have to do. I had had it. Battering off defeat, I thought very hard on making a new leader wallet, because there is no way I'm going to have trouble like this in the spring. It popped into mind that there's probably no reason to trouble over making my own wallet. I owned a wallet I made during my teens until I lost it a couple of years ago, but nowadays of course, I could just check on what's for sale online. I got a cast in, the swivels took the egg near bottom, and then when I made the second cast, the rig got caught in branches hanging pretty high over the current I hadn't noticed. I broke off and said the hell with it.

I haven't felt frustration as I did this afternoon since my teens. A burning kind of frustration. But I got my head together before I marched entirely off the premises with that resolve to buy a leader wallet. At least I know now I need one this spring. Yup. Had I driven all the way to the South Branch to have this sort of trouble, it would have sucked a lot worse. I got home and immediately ordered a 10-leaf leader wallet from Amazon. Then Trish, me, and Sadie went for that, successful, photo shoot.

After we got home the whole afternoon felt very invigorating.  

Relaxed Beside an Island, Ordinary Life Seems Absurd

Every fall, I manage to get out on Lake Hopatcong and fish the drop-offs, but even worse than last fall, the warmth had kept the lake from turning over and the trees from changing color. For longer than a week, I was aware of cooler weather forecast, and I hoped it would make a significant difference, because with temperatures in the 70's and 80's, I knew fish would be suspended over drop-offs at best. Mark Licht and I met at Dow's Boat Rentals just after 6:00 a.m., and instead of temperatures in the mid-30's as forecast, they hovered around 40, but of course that's a lot better than the 71-degree reading I noticed at first light on Wednesday.

Brian Cronk was supposed to come, but he phoned me Saturday night, telling me a friend of his had shot a bear and he had to help in the morning. Brian and I have tried to get out and fish together since early June. We're jinxed. Instead, I would meet his UPS driver. I found Mark to be great company. Brian and I have planned on fishing Lake Wawayanda for what seems an eternity now, me interested in going Old School and fishing live shiners for big pickerel common there, Brian wanting Atlantic salmon usually referred to as landlocked salmon here. It so happened that when Mark and I got off the lake, a man and his wife of foreign description were busy cleaning a good-size pickerel, so I went across the dock and joined them for a moment, admiring a limit catch of pickerel that seemed to range from 18 to maybe 22 inches. I know of one angler who claims he prefers eating pickerel to walleye, a radical dissent from the usual derision about these pike family members, just because of Y bones in their backs. In any case, and I've tried pickerel and they're good, this moment before Mark and I departed to go home seemed portentous to the fishing Brian and I will do yet, and it's good to be reminded that deep drop-offs in October are not the only possibility on Lake Hopatcong.

"The motor is quiet!" Mark spoke above the hum as we motored away from Dow's. He has a large center-console, but wanted to try from one of Laurie Murphy's boats. He told me fishing for him is about the big picture, not just the narrow limitation, as he described it, of keeping eyesight glued to the linear form casts create. He takes the environment in, and I said it's the same for me. Readers of this blog know I take great liberties, perhaps less so at description of environments I fish, than of rendering accounts of complex ideational moods these places inspire in me. I haven't written any posts recently true to what I've called grand affirmation, not since the Tilcon Lake posts, keeping instead to more conventional accounts of the fishing, but perhaps by the time I finish writing this one, I will have written material that Lenny Matera and Fred Matero--each other's best friend with nearly identical last names--say they can't understand.

Mark and I began fishing a mid-lake drop, finding suspended fish stacked over 38 feet of water, but instead of fishing them right off the bat, I put a marker buoy in the water, and then with the words of Jimmy Welsh at the shop in mind, "I've been catching them 20 feet deep," we anchored in 14 feet of water to the side of that buoy set near the drop-off's deep end. Jimmy had also said, "Striper fishing sucks," mentioning smallmouth bass this deep instead. Well, maybe a walleye would take a live herring.

We set our baits 14 to 25 feet deep, and soon Mark hooked the first walleye he's ever caught. Sun had barely reached the horizon. Later Jimmy would weigh this fish at four pounds, seven ounces. Five minutes later I caught a two-and-three-quarter-pound walleye. And then besides my catching a one-pound (or so) walleye an hour later, nothing else hit and so we went after those fish near the buoy.

There must have been hundreds of stripers under the boat and around the boat. We tried to catch them for a solid two or three hours. The lake almost dead calm, we had no trouble putting herring and also chicken livers on their noses. We jigged. I rode a Binsky bladebait through the school repeatedly. Not one hit. Later, I would discuss this with Laurie, and she said it happens all the time, "And then, like last week, someone will catch 40 or 50 of them." Seems like you can always depend on largemouth bass. Just put a proper lure in a bass's lair, and you'll catch some, as Mark and I did on this trip, but these hybrid stripers seem downright weird regarding feeding habits.

We had to give up, or else we wouldn't use our dozen nightcrawlers. And this is when the trip got to feeling especially good, or at least it did for me. With the electric, I pushed the boat at a pretty good clip up to an island where my son and I have fished for more than a decade. We used ultralights to catch all sorts of panfish and bass. Mark also used a heavier rod and Senko to catch a bass and lose a pickerel at the boat. I set three lines out deep for walleye, and eventually, Mark caught a walleye a little bigger than the larger of my two.

But best of all, whatever you want to call it--psychological resistance, habitual responses, suppression, all the big words for a simple problem--the tension, which doing a hard job day after day builds as a defense to doing anything amiss, gave way. I had first uttered some words to Mark I forget now, but a moment's reflection on them was pleasing to me for their spontaneity and grace. So much is written against language, among spiritual circles of the Eastern variety, as if talk is a hindrance to Zen and what not, but nothing could be further from the truth on this outing. Once I had spoken a few times, words devoid of mannerism and more intelligent than anything typical, the bottom dropped out under my tendency to suppress natural flow to get the job done, and I was free. For at least an hour before we left as 1:00 pm approached, I lived purely in the moment, completely accepting the mess we made of the boat and the sort of helter-skelter character of dipping many lines. And upon reflecting on it for a moment, ordinary life seemed so absurd and a waste of energy and life, as if the whole problem with society is that we don't let go.
 

Most of the fish we marked were at 17 feet, but sometimes the graph was almost full of fish icons across the screen. Some fish did mark as deep as 31 feet, so the lake is turning over, but not any deeper than that as of yesterday.

All these years fishing herring, this had never happened, but it happened a second time after I shot this photo.

Mid-October normally features peak fall colors. So far, there's barely any change from summertime.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2017/10/an-american-fishery.html

Ignorant of the Natural World

Told my wife I would get up minutes before first light, fish two hours, clean the fish, and get a little sleep before spending my day off from work at various tasks. Then we would go out and see a movie after she got home from work, as we will, but so far, the day hasn't gone as planned. Got up before first light, but contrary to expectation, I wasn't the first there at my local river. Three cars had parked. I soon positioned riverside with Sadie the black Lab, who is mellow in old age, but stupidly I had rigged my 3 1/2-foot microlight rod with two leaders. Naturally, they had tangled. On the spur of the moment back home, I decided I "wouldn't need" my headlamp. Sheer stupidity, that. Presently, as I cut line with my teeth, I remembered that I hadn't made the coffee, so most likely, the coffee pot was boiling out stovetop, and I made a mental note to phone my wife. An arduous process of tying a new leader in the semi-dark felt frustrating, but of course, I had to get this right. Amazing how you can focus with all your feeble intent on a simple action--as mosquitos tear at your skin--and finally look up to see that night had become day during the interval between discovering the problem and solving it.

Those mosquitos didn't seem very out of place, because it was so warm I could have just worn a T-shirt. Sickly temperatures for this time of year. Leaves show some signs of color, at least. I didn't bother snapping a photo, but those leaves are nowhere near the depth and range of color they should be by now. This coming Sunday I have off--most likely--and Brian Cronk and I have been messaging about fishing the Hopatcong drops. It's supposed to turn sharply cooler, so water temperature isn't likely to be above 70, a temperature that is just insane for mid-October, but will it really get down into the low 60's so there's appreciable lake turnover by Sunday? My fish sense tells me I will relate more bad news on this blog that evening, so I'm kind of hoping we schedule for the 28th...if I get that Sunday off.

I guess New Jersey is the new South Carolina. Recent years have been all too warm, and it gets worse. Ninety-degree days in November? Is this really impossible in our future? Here come the tupelo trees and palm fronds. And how many more Category 4 hurricanes will bear down on our coasts in the next 10 years. People care about the economy, right? So why destroy it, time and again, by emitting undo megatons of carbon?

Here it is fall, and I was wondering if the trout wouldn't hit--no one there caught anything while I was present--because it's too warm. I've fished these fall stockers very little over the years, and mostly by fly fishing. I decided to try the salmon egg method on them, the first time I've done this besides back when the trout stocked in the fall were small, and I caught lots of those on three occasions. I was disappointed this morning, but I heard bird song of various species; I saw a bunch of nice trout, and in general I got outdoors and enjoyed the dawn of new day, in spite of the sort of sick feel of inappropriate warmth. Having fished for about 20 minutes, I sped back home to get that coffee pot off the stove, fearing it had...overheated.

No, I was wise. I had taken it off the burner before I left.

As I drove, I thought again of the oddity of people who pursue stocked trout, as I sometimes think about the peculiar social situation, me among it in my own microlight way, and yet when I recall one of my favorite waters from my teenage years, Stony Brook in Mercer County, I always think first of the smallmouth bass, not the trout. (Stocked trout only.) For the most part, I had those bronzebacks--many, many dozens of them--all to myself. I fished with my brother Rick a lot, my brother David some, my friend Steve Rosso, but I best remember outings alone after school and on weekends or over the summer. I used to walk and wade at length and catch bass after bass on three-inch Mister Twister grubs on plain shank size 2 hooks. Strong, lean wild fish. No crowds flocking for them at all. Of course not.

And we know why. The media mentality and the ignorance of people all too beholden to the media, in regards to the actual world they live in, is here to stay. At least for a while yet. By and large, no fishermen knew about the smallmouth bass in Stony Brook. If most freshwater fishermen in New Jersey pursue stocked trout, I can say almost for a certainty that some of them possess but little inkling that fish other than what the state puts in exist, besides some sunfish. You might second guess that and correct me: no, that's the population at large who don't fish. But I've talked to people who know a bass here and there gets caught, but who otherwise have no idea whatsoever of the healthy resident populations existing here in this state. I have been fooled, too, though in a different way, because I was thinking of a mud-bottomed river ecology with regard to the possibility of smallmouth bass in a certain Morris County stream. (I won't get into certain follies from my young years.) Oliver Round put a wager on me regarding this judgement of mine, and later gathered information to contradict my opinion. I also didn't know that stream hosted wild browns upstream, until Oliver showed me the steady fly fishing. There's a whole lot more involved in knowing the real world than what the internet and TV can provide. Newspapers and other media faithfully report on trout stocking, and crowds of people obediently respond, as if this media effect is what fishing is all about.

That's just how any society is. By and large ignorant of the natural world. And we all would well agree--just as well that crowds don't go after the wild fish. They never will.

Besides, if you think posting information like this is detrimental to fish populations, think again. Who has read this far into this post, but few of you. And if you're intelligent enough to have come this far, you're wise to the conservation of these fish anyhow.


http://fishinginnewjersey.blogspot.com/2011/10/north-branch-raritan-river-release.html  

Nice Largemouth South Branch Raritan

Killies left over from the time of my "Rough" post, the Island Beach State Park outing my wife and I took on September 16th, have survived very well even without use of my aerator, although three of the largest did die when I was keeping the bucket indoors about two weeks ago. Cooler weather and keeping that bucket on the porch was perfect.

So very late this afternoon I finally went to the South Branch Raritan, to my favorite stretch alone except for our black Lab Sadie, and found the river running very high but not very off-color, visibility a little better than two feet.

I had to check the depths where I often catch bass, the killie rigged with a medium split shot, though I was all but certain nothing was going to hit there, because the current was strong. Two drifts, the split shot clipping bottom, were enough. I aimed a cast downstream to the edge between current and slow water, an edge not very well defined, but the cast veered left to put the killie into the slow water. I let it sink a moment and then began a slow retrieve, feeling a firm pick-up within a couple of seconds, letting the fish take for another two seconds, and then setting the size 6 plain shank hook into a nice fish.

Not only did I forget my new Rapala digital scale; I forgot to set drag to accommodate six-pound test instead of 15-pound braid, just as I forgot last October when Mike Maxwell witnessed a big smallmouth snap my line of the same test. This time the fish didn't threaten a heavy run so fast, and I was on that drag, loosening it.

This fish wasn't nearly as big as the one I lost last year, but it was a nice largemouth, the largest of this species I've caught in any of these small New Jersey rivers, 16 inches, and though there are bigger largemouths in the rivers, you don't very often even come upon small ones. Before I left after sundown, I had caught additionally three regular-size smallmouths of nine to about 10 1/2 inches, all these fish hitting along edges between that heavy current and where it slows against shallow water.


http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2013/09/four-pound-smallmouth-bass-south-branch.html