Fly Fishing New Jersey Trout Before the Bell

Today's trip to the Pequest River reminded us both, my son and I, of the Salmon River near Pulaski, New York, because the lot at the Trout Conservation Area just off Route 46 filled.

Temperatures in the 60's made for a great afternoon. Everyone I spoke to appreciated the warmth and some of them caught trout on nymphs, all of these fish released. I did manage to turn a fairly good-size brown, about 13 inches, on a zebra midge, missing the strike. Much larger trout frequent the river and get caught on occasion, and while of course we had such fish in mind, we didn't expect any, since our experience with this river before we stepped in was nil. For a river experienced fly fishermen can depend on for action before closing in anticipation of Opening Day, it's beautifully marked by boulders and deep pockets between, by bank cuts, holes, and stretches that can occupy you for hours if you like.

We spent at least a half hour plumbing a long stretch far downstream of where we parked, along with another angler fishing a Hare's Ear. We got involved in conversation, during which he claimed to have once caught a 10-pound brown right where he stood as evening approached.

After he spoke of this fish, I just savored a long moment, cast and relaxed before we would head back to the car, having to drive nearly an hour back home, reflecting on all the things a day away from more narrow routines inspires.   

I'm a novice fly angler and so is my son. I can catch dozens of stocked trout on salmon eggs, fathead minnows (brown trout), or spinners,  and for the salmon eggs I use a 3 1/2-foot super ultra-light with a tip so light it can seemingly almost be tied in a knot. Two-pound test carries no more than a small barrel swivel for weight. It takes skill. Trout steal salmon eggs like blackfish chop pealer crabs off a hook, or sheepshead remove sand fleas with teeth that look exactly human on a small scale. Whether or not I continue fishing this method I first adopted at age 14 is yet to be seen.

This angler captures a 16-inch brown he released

Zebra midge, I believe size 20

Something hatched a little, don't know what

Early Season Vertical Jigging Walleyes & Striper Hybrids: Slow Passes Over Drop-Offs, Thought of Mild Winter on Salmon River

So two posts in one day isn't too much after all. Thought I would put a picture of my son with a Lake Hopatcong walleye, actually from October, to grace my word rambling since quite a few are being caught vertical jigged now--hybrids too. But with the wind forecasted for this afternoon, drifts wouldn't be very good, as slow passes over the point drop offs are what you need.

That's why I reluctantly--still reluctant!--have cancelled on the Pequest today. Fly casting in 30-mph wind is annoying at the least. This despite my hunch that these winds won't happen. Maybe 10, 15 mph. But I just don't trust my intuition enough to go ahead and do it against what the weather forecasters are posting. I can't know I'm right. I can't know they are, of course. But some probability exists that ferocious winds will churn through the little Pequest valley, and I don't want to be there in that, not when we can probably go either Saturday or Sunday next weekend.

We better. I've had it in mind to fish the Pequest since December. I'm kicking myself. 

One Saturday back around the first of the year was calm 65 degrees. There I was walking the dog late in the afternoon when I realized what an ass I was for not having gone. I hadn't even recognized the possibility until that late in the day.

This winter was surely a great one for Salmon River steelhead drift boat anglers, fly rodders and noodle rodders alike. Joe at Steelhead Lodge told me they normally have 20 feet of snow by sometime in February. Meanwhile, he has guests throughout the winter, going downriver to fish eight-hour stints at zero degrees. Yes, of course these boats have propane heaters, most of the heat whisked away by breezes. That fishing is so hardcore--it seems easy to ice fish by comparison because hardwater is a stable environment that allows you to manage better in general--that even I balk at ever doing it, even though I used to clam for a living (and most of all adventure), daily, treading in wetsuits brine as cold as 29 degrees with wind chills below zero. 

Anyhow, I wonder how much snow is up there this winter.

http://www.fishinginnewjersey.blogspot.com/

P.S. It's almost 2:00 pm and guess what? Yup, the wind is 10 mph, and now forecasted to be 15-20 mph. I bet it never sustains itself over 15 and should I have been a weather forecaster? NO! Because the training in all the models in rooms and routines sealed off from--weather--would have ruined my intuition. And you can't get a job by intuition.

Having had Scant Resources for Fishing

Two posts in one day would be too good I guess. When I hit the publish button it will probably be after midnight. But having finished the previous post 20 minutes ago, gone downstairs to put dishes in the washer, and I got to my thinking as I always do over this chore I appreciate for its regular need, I decided to post on resources for successful fishing.

In a way I'm respectful of the classic image of fishing being the boy with the stick and string tied to the end of it with a hook on the other end of the string and a worm on that, a piece of straw grass between the boy's incisors. As wildly enriched as the American fishing scene has become, and as bipolar as I am, since I can move from grand affirmations of global dreams, of fishing the world over equipped by the best, and then return to the boy with say a Zebco 202, I don't forget the guy who can't afford all this wealth thrown at him by ads everywhere. Wealth he can't afford and that seems to sort of make fun of him, or you could imagine worse motives, as if it's all a grand charade, the intent of which is to crush most of us by an enormous power of suggestion about enormous political power. Oh, gee. I forgot our great pride in the American dream. 

But this is because I've been there--unlike Mit Romney and many others. Not just as an eight-year-old with a Zebco 202 in fact, but as a 32-year-old reduced to a beat-up old fiberglass 6-foot rod in 1993 my brother Rick gave me, and to my wits in having taken two old Penn 716's, one green from the 1970's, and one gold and black from the 1980's, both broken, but, aha!--having examined each, I inferred that by taking the head off the 70's, and placing it on the body of the 80's, I would have a working a reel. 

That's what I fished with. It was all I could afford. I had been in the shellfishing business, owned nine boats during the 80's, then lost almost almost everything but my writings and books. I don't regret any of it. My reel contraption was perfect--head from the 70's, body from the 80's. During the 70's Americans still had an intellectual conscience, something that had better return in some form, and to which I'm committed to help bring back. Without it we'll get the hell we deserve--just like I did.

Anyhow, I'm with you if you're poor. And I'll tell you why--you have a mind. That's how anyone begins.

http://www.fishinginnewjersey.blogspot.com/

Spring Fishing is Here in NJ: Brown Trout, Lake Trout, Pike, Musky, etc.

I felt spring arrive in New Jersey two weeks ago, but plenty fish have been caught all winter, despite almost no ice. I just didn't get out much.

I posted in Fishing in New Jersey after catching a brown trout at Round Valley on my lunch break a week ago Friday. Caught it in the most conventional way--m&m's, marshmallow & mealworm--while reading Gray's Sporting Journal editor James R. Babb's book Crosscurrents.

Now I hear shoreline trout are being caught on small Rapala Husky Jerks, those suspending minnow plugs. Catch them any way you want to try. Next time I'm thinking of using shiners. (And getting some more reading in yet.)

That other scenic photo is Spruce Run Resevoir in March. Pike have been caught shallow for about a month now, and I suppose they spawned a while ago.

Tomorrow--if this line of what were major thunderstorms which bred killer tornados fades by noon--my son and I fly fish the Pequest. Heard of some five-pound browns on tiny zebra midges.

I love to read J.B. Kasper's Freshwater report in the The Fisherman each week (and Nick Honechevsky's Beach Talk in season). I am wildly impressed by South Jersey Fisherman Field Editor Mark Modoski having driven all the way up to Hopatcong and nailing musky at least 46 inches and 30 pounds. I know very well it's done consistently by certain people on the lake virtually every weekend, or more often, but for a guy to just come up from another region altogther and do it suggests a great ability to interpret new fishing technique and water right off the bat, although I am assuming the Field Editor is somewhat new to this. Reading about fishing for muskies on Lake Hopatcong in February piqued my excitement. It's not that I'm comfortable with this abnormal weather, but I guess the kid in me came out, the happy expectation I used to have of the coming season on mild late winter days. This year those days have been the usual and I sort of took them in all together symbolized by fishing a plug in February when normally we would be cutting a foot of ice. At any rate, to have a very generalized capability to acquire new fishing abilities is the grand life, and it is done by some, and also possible for more people given: 1. Gumption. 2. Some resources. 

Sometimes to get some gumption you just need to hear a good story.

P.S. March 16, 2012: Read Mark Modowski's comments below to clarify some misinformation, most which I've corrected. I left the part in about him just coming up from South Jersey because he is new to musky fishing, so well enough. And especially check out his blog, Catfish on the Lake: http://www.catfishonthelake.com/  The story about the musky and photographs are worth appreciating deeply. Other posts are informative and have an original appeal. 

http://www.fishinginnewjersey.blogspot.com/

Fishing Spots I Value Fast, yet Want to Holdfast

I fall in love with places easily and in-depth. "Shepherd Lake Makes a Promise," I named a blog post this past summer--the lake was mine the first outing. This is why Lake Musconetcong is a serious loss since loads of weed killer were dumped on the lake in 2010, discoloring the water and ruining fishing with habitat loss and 10 fold increase of cormorant flocks. These killer diving birds eat pounds of fish per day; without the aquatic vegetation to inhibit their underwater swimming after bass, pickerel, perch and panfish, they have open lanes to take what they can easily get. The word among some fishermen is "Oh, no problem," but we hear this said of so many issues that really are a problem, although I don't know for a fact that the lake won't come back. I have never been so well placed on a body water as I was at Lake Musconetcong for five years, not since I fished a string of five or six acre impoundments, six of them, at Princeton Day School, a large acreage estate I had permission to fish in my youth. That's my son photographed in 2008, watching silver shiners in Lake Musconetcong water so clear you could read the date on a dime on the bottom five feet down.

At the end of my last post, I said I would have a post following from the two concerning Izaak Walton and Aristotle, but I decided not to do it. It's possible I will revise what I wrote by hand and post it sometime ahead.

Should be a good year of fishing for my son and I, friends and I. Matt's got an inflatable that holds 800 pounds; I'll look into an electric with plenty of thrust soon. I dread what a pain in the ass inflating this boat may be before dawn at Split Rock, to name one destination in mind, but on the other hand, I deal well with necessities and best of all it will get us out on places I've had in mind for years. It does supposedly come with an electric air pump with a cigarette lighter connection or whatever you call it now that smoking is so taboo and cars don't have actual lighters.

Some winter--is this South Carolina now? Someone told my yesterday that it's El Nino again, not global warming. Anyhow, daffodils are up in New Jersey with buds about to open. I have missed ice fishing, although not sorely. When I have the opportunity to do it in the future, maybe next winter, it will come back like a hard, crusty, very good friend.

http://www.fishinginnewjersey.com/

Ice Fishing Symbolizes American Gumption

What on this planet more resembles the lunar surface than either a frozen lake, or the polar wastes? Deserts abound with life compared to these frigid expanses, and the Sahara seems more hospitable for its heat. In July 1969, the American Apollo mission climaxed nearly 200 years of national history when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, whether he ever ice fished or not.

America had reached its destiny as an essentially scientific culture; the lunar missions were Isaac Newton's theories made concrete in no finer way. They were formed into a vehicle for both exploration and human drama. Today respect for science has since publically declined, but biology is less visible publically than technical achievements embodying physics.

1969 marks the end of the age of physics. Not necessarily is progress in this science fading, but biology (including neuroscience) has replaced physics as the hallmark of the age. Next in line will be psychology. Neuroscience is not psychology, although it has astonishing implications for psychology. No doubt neuroscience is helping to make fantastic discoveries and practices in psychology possible in the future.

The complexity of specific sciences moves from physics, to biology, and then to psychology in order of lesser to greater, biology resting on physical knowledge, and psychology upon physical and biological knowledge. This order of progression also signifies increasing individual privacy, a move away from public to private domain. Where is computer science in this picture? Related to physics and mathematics, computer science is certainly related to neuroscience and psychology as well. But I promise you computer science will never trump psychology for complexity. Computer science, like any other, is produced by the mind--the issue of psychology--which is more complex than we can ever know, since the moment we learn something new, more possibilities sprout.

So the ages of American science are not over and a most significant age is yet to dawn. It's not that we have no psychology; it just isn't the main focus yet. I know of a psychotherapist with a portrait of Freud on her office wall; this says something about how slow to start psychology is. Not that Freud was a dunce. But he lived long ago in a completely different time.

It all depends on American gumption, however. If we cave in, collapse, give up on initiative, we may have no nation or world at all in the future, or we may have a society that resembles what we call a third world nation now.

What do you think of people who go out ice fishing? Even among fishermen we're viewed as odd, but Garrison Keilor loves us and I thank him for this. Imagine if you lived 200 years ago in America. Could you? Would you survive? If so, you had gumption. And you were an outdoors person unless you lived in Philadelphia perhaps, although I do not exclude Benjamin Franklin as one of us nature lovers. He loved French parlors too, and I have no problem with this.

But we don't ice fish to uphold tradition, although we in fact do keep the American spirit alive to some extent. We do it because we have a special gumption. It's a power within us more ancient than this nation. But this nation came after times before in a most elemental way, which puts it on par with Ancient Civilization. But I'm not referring to Egypt or Sumeria so much as Greece. This may be no more than a prayer, but I'm willing to make it even if I'm all alone.

Until next post, already written by hand for the most part, let's hope for ice in New Jersey this week. My next post will follow more directly from the previous two. But all posts in my archives interrelate. Post a comment and join the web.

http://www.fishinginnewjersey.blogspot.com/

Reflections on Academia, Aristotle, Plato, Greatness, Order & Chaos

Comments through email from one of my brothers prompted me to reflect on the previous Litton's Fishing Lines post. It's winter, often a time for thought rather than outdoor activity. If I fish Round Valley soon, I'll just still fish for trout and read, tending the rig on occasion.

The post's title might suggest I tolerate nothing of Plato (so also nothing of Socrates), which isn't true, and of course it wasn't true of Aristotle either. Nor am I against academia. To be a critic of an institution does not necessarily mean one suffers an oppositional disorder, not that my brother's comments suggest one does. But as often happens with him, his presence serves as a corrective for me to what could be misconstrued as overly onesided leaning. Yes, "Against Plato" in the title of my post is provocative, and I do take hard lines against anyone who promulgates a totalatarian state. Of course not all academics do, and I suppose very few, if any, do. I am merely suspicious of The Academy because it originates in a man with such a scheme for power. I sometimes personally distrust The Academy for its high level of autocracy, not that this constitutes any real threat of governmental totalatarianism, but it tends to produce denial in all sorts of forms, including governmental.

The gist of my brother's comments is that academia organizes knowledge through peer review--thus knowledge builds on previous knowledge. It does. But Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, for example, made their essential discoveries outside academia. Certainly academics quickly took interest. But this is not always the case for great men and women who produce outside. Friedrich Nietzsche comes to mind, writing outside academia with very few sales of his books during his lifetime. Herman Melville finished life as a wage worker. Both of these men's work is now regarded as truly great. Other examples exist of such appalling failures of greatness which were not the fault of the creators. To possess the notion that their lives of struggle and indifference from others were fitting sacrifices for us would be an unspeakable injustice.

My brother made the further point that the peer review process gives coherance to knowledge, which otherwise would be "a disheveled mess." I had made the point in the piece I wrote that we need our institutions. They organize means. But as a reader who fishes, I presume, you know we need to go away and fish too. We need to unwind and unlearn assumptions so that fresh awareness may allow new knowledge to emmerge just like hatches in streams pure enough for this to be possible. And if you visit some professor's offices as I have, you find--a disheveled mess. These are not necessarily the habits of under-performers, and the photo upon Einstein's death of his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, N.J., is a classic.

Chaos is fertile. The writer seized by mania, the angler fishing a blitz, and the fascinated modern chaos theorist know this. But if no clean gains result, it's only overkill.  

The Idea of America and the Possibility of the Mind

(My study)