Start Casting a Spinner Soon, Bound to get Warm

Still reading Edward Abbey, almost finished, and not catching trout. Another man had fished for hours, nothing, and someone walked in to cast a Kastmaster, which he said he's been doing well with, along with a Binsky. I still mean to start casting a spinner. Since late fall, Round Valley restores my senses and mood, which tend to get road-jaded, although not always. A lot of nature writers escape into the mysteries, but consciousness opens up where it can and a wide open setting is different than being boxed in the metal of a car and enduring tire friction, etc., on the ears.

Once it Warms, I Will be Compelled

Pretty soon these barricades will be removed and campers can launch from the Lot 2 area. Round Valley Recreation Area will charge admission to the area I've spent most of the winter visiting in solitude. Beginning Memorial Day, not so long off now.

Quite a few dog walkers and hikers present in today's sun. No one else fished but one man I noticed briefly at the vanishing point of a bend. It's about time for me to get on my feet, walk, cast spinners, but surgery on my foot recently is forbidding yet, and my right knee, which I had surgery on over a year ago, is acting up, but not so badly that I can't amble about.

I sat in the car most of the time today and read Edward Abbey. I'm so into reading, I feel reluctant to get out and cast. But once it warms, I will be compelled.

Good Weather for Trout and Walleyes if More would Hit

Strong wind, overcast sky, falling barometer--good fishing weather and no trout. Perhaps what I should do is buy shiners and fish the Delaware and Raritan Canal at the lock on Weston Canal Road for walleyes on days like this. Likelihood of catching one is very slim since not many walleyes exist in the canal, but some do, or at least now and then some do, making the swim all the way down to the New Brunswick region having entered from the Delaware River at Bulls Island. To catch one, you probably need a day like today, and the cold water doesn't stop a walleye from hitting, although late October might be ideal if any walleyes happen to be there.

Another man was fishing when I arrived, had been at it since morning for two hits. I saw his rod bend and he missed that hit also. That's why I prefer to leave the bail open. Let the trout run on a loose line.

Looking forward to really fishing. Felt that today. Just happen to desire saltwater more than freshwater now, since we've been planning a vacation to Ocracoke this summer. I can just smell the brine air in back of the house we rent with a boardwalk to a tidal cut full of killiefish my son and I pot for bait. My present curiosity is whether or not fluke will be in the surf as they are along the Jersey coast and accessible to split shot casting. My son hooked a fluke over three pounds two years ago right at the boat launch on Pamlico Sound, but we had no more time to experiment since Hurricane Irene bore down on us our second day. The 10-day forecast now is for weather in the 40's as of yesterday. But that probably means it will warm up when I'm on vacation first week of April.

The vacation in North Carolina will be even better. That I can promise myself.

If You can Spend Time Alone and be Happy

Rained so heavily, this is the only photograph I took. Once again, good weather for fishing, no trout. No one else around, either, only a ranger that motioned at me from his window-sealed cab to move my vehicle into a parking space. 

Well, if he hadn't, I wouldn't have got this shot taken with the driver's door quickly opened, then closed. I happen to like it. 

Once it really gets warm, that dock will be placed in the water to the right of the picture. Round Valley Reservoir will be speckled with boats, kayaks, canoes, and the shorelines near the main boat launch and this Lot 2 area will host wandering couples, bass fishermen, trout fishermen: specks of red, yellow, blue and brown, etc. that give the place a blithe feeling of airy abandon, as if many realizations of everything being alright come to people here. 

But I have to say I like having spent an entire late fall and winter coming to the Valley and sometimes seeing not a single other car in the large lot and no one else in view. I like a place forbidding with the weather doing the trick here in New Jersey. It's not that I don't like people. I like being alone sometimes. And to be able to be alone often and/or at length would mean that one likes people, since a man alone has to put up with himself. 

If you can spend time alone and feel happy, that means you're a good person who passes the tests of deeper stuff coming up.

Reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Anticipating Space to Fill

I was reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire as I waited for a hit, took a break to go out, walk, shoot photos, and didn't realize until just now that as all winter long I never honored pine trees as I did today, the event of my shooting them goes well with the book. (What are those, white pines?) Abbey spent a season as an Arches National Monument or Park, whichever it is, ranger in Utah, and a certain ash is or was the only deciduous tree in the wilderness he contemplated and explored.

 

It's been nice here at Round Valley all winter and much of the fall. If it wasn't, I wouldn't keep returning. I can almost touch May now. April I'm not big about because the trout fishing from shore remains pretty slow and the bass aren't active yet. Even at Mount Hope Pond last April I caught none. Here in Bedminster, I caught loads of bass in the neighborhood pond, but it's a shallow dishpan and warms like a skillet on the stove. Or like an egg on a desert rock. I wonder what kind at Arches. At Mount Hope, I tried jigging at the bottom of the 12 foot drop, but never got a tap. I messed about in the shallows, too, but nothing seemed to be there. Colonial Park Pond is another story with that silty water absorbing heat and I suspect I'll catch a few. But once the season gets under way, something of stark contemplation with the grand outlines is lost because the green and the pleasure in warmth and scents and visible activities here and there fills in the picture and you tend not to experience the wide edges, wide outlines barren and open more like depicted in Abbey's book.

Round Valley Reservoir Heavy Wind Fickle Trout Fishing

Conditions seemed just right to have some trout action today at Round Valley Reservoir. John had fished for hours without a hit and I fished nearly two hours, also. The shiner's still alive. The waves really roll with heavy wind since the water is so deep and the swells build.

I bet the shoreline fishing in May is better for trout. By June it's all over; you need a boat. But I saw two 20-inch browns caught on shiners from shore while I fished for bass last year. I also saw two browns and a 20-inch laker caught last late February and caught a brown myself in weather a little less severe than today's. I guess I'll start casting spinners soon. In today's wind that would have been difficult, although with clouds of sediment stirred up by the wave action and settling back as many as ten yards out, heavy spinners that could be cast in the wind may have been effective, who knows. I know that a few bass in May run along the edges of browned water when wind is high.

Reading The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder at Round Valley Reservoir

Reading Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild on my lunch breaks, putting out the line at Round Valley Reservoir every other day. I'll probably fish shiners and marshmallow & mealworms into April and may start casting spinners soon, but have a lot of reading to do. Looking forward to bass fishing in May.

John caught nothing today, nor I.

The two young women I photographed as a blur, the photo resized in the camera, walked fast talking animatedly, too caught up in each other to be much aware of the wilds they traversed. But even intensely social activity outdoors results in the environment contributing to refreshment.

I feel as if I would go a lot deeper into the wilds if I had the money and time, needing to earn more money first to pay for the time. In our culture, wage work takes a lot of it, very difficult to rise above. But while I would and possibly may clam the bays behind Long Beach Island for more than a day's stint, I will never immerse myself in such an adventure as my 13 years' doing it commercially again, simply because I got the secrets I was after and don't need to leave everyone else behind once more. Besides, it's getting obvious that at my age, youthful adventure was just that. So I'm happy with as much as I do now, which is really no small matter.

Everything in existence has in essence natural identity, everything we synthesize a rearrangement of natural elements. Why is this important? Some portion of the wild nourishes, sustains, expands awareness and feeling wherever you are. Fundamentally, this is what we depend on. The air we breathe, for example. For me, all it takes is a look in the direction of and into some nearby trees to relieve an anxiety. So I have no need of paying the exhorbitant fees of a doctor, just to get a prescription of Lexapro or whatever, for which a doctor might get a kickback from a pharmaceutical company.

We're supposed to be hard-nosed Americans who grab our mother by the neck, force her down, and subjugate her to markets, selling her for the first fists of cash to come our way, but nature never really has been that woman conquered, and the time of reckoning is here: nature is the system we think we've built to subdue the wilds that may seem to threaten. We've derived each and every principle from nature, and it's an unsustainable contradiction to think we can master what is primary by what is secondary. How we live in a principled way will determine if we survive, the rules we enact according with reality.