Water Plans

Looking ahead to tomorrow. Plan on fishing Round Valley Reservoir for bass from shore, thanks to Fred Matero, who wrote me recently about hooking a big one. I've got my sunglasses ready. Look for those deeper spots in view. Lenny might ham it up over his best friend's name mentioned once again, but Fred gets some credit on this one, as I wouldn't have thought to do this without his recent initiative. I was thinking, instead, of casting metals for rainbow trout soon. This would have to wait at least a week, maybe two.

By the time this writing posts, it will be just after midnight. I'm doodling with words. Recently, I noted an interruption affecting the quality of what I write. Got over that pretty well in the previous post.

You never know how these outings turn out. I re-read some of my Lehigh River post minutes ago. It speaks of expecting no more than some good photos, but what do you know; I came upon fish. "...we never know until we have completed a full effort."

That said, nothing's more important than the mind at work in planning. If you're going somewhere. My father was always meticulous at planning and still functions this way at 82. He's away at Notre Dame University as I write, still active and vital. I enjoyed alcoholism during my teens, but this never swayed me from planning the events of my life. One of my favorite activities at school was planning a week ahead in the privacy of my mind.

I've always felt my father's too constrained by his plans, but I never quite make the mistake of judging him adversely on this. After all, he's the man who just completed a great trip in Europe last week, and I'm the guy working in a supermarket. But I know how to improvise upon a plan so something great is achieved, rather than sticking compulsively to a preconception.

This is what I always want coming away from an outing. A feeling of grandeur that isn't vacuous and loose as if filled only with spirit--or hot air. Fisherman feel familiar with water. And if my statistic is correct, about 98% of the human body is made of water. This is a substance--H2O--perhaps more earthy and human than any other.

Black River

Black River photo shoot's been in mind for about a month. I need a photo for a magazine piece I hope to pitch; no guarantee, of course, that the editor will run with the idea. I got down riverside among boulders, cool water in my boots, set up my tripod, got out my D7100 with the Tokina wide angle, and began attempting to mount that camera. Aha. The tripod mount needs work. I placed the camera safely aside and found there's a Phillip's head screw underneath, so I may be able to fix this myself, and if not, I know a place in Morristown that might do the work. 

Managed to get a shot that might work for the magazine, just in case I don't get back up to Chester to shoot fast water at narrow aperture, thus creating that blurred water effect that looks cool. Otherwise, the photo above captures an angle, and the photo below I shot straight down as I stumbled for a moment, never really threatened with falling off the edge of that rock.

It's a day off work. I had gone out for a smoke on our porch, looked to the sun, and had known instantly this is no day to waste. At the time, I was into reading the second of two O'Henry short stories, "Supply and Demand," from the Options collection. The first, "The World and a Door," is from Whirligigs. I identified with the Island Time theme of "The World and a Door," though it's not set on an island as such, but in La Paz, Bolivia. Copyright 1914.

My drive to Chester was like other drives there and elsewhere, full of fire and fury; as I consider the engine of my car, no matter how quiet it is, I think of the power, and also of cars and 18-wheelers and the like passing by in the lane opposite. And then I was by the river shortly after all that burning of fossil fuel was done for me. I sampled the sort of natural essences I mentioned in yesterday's post, but when I was finished the shoot, I felt I hadn't really achieved very much, and told myself to keep fishing, because the participation involved in the fishing game seems to involve more substance and exercise than coming to a river for a photo shoot. But this caveat. What if I were to devout hours to photographing a river, complete with say a half mile or more of walking, just experimenting with different scenes and angles?

The closest I've come to doing this, besides boyhood years when I used to spend hours at a time exploring Little Shabakunk Creek, which I called Little Shabaconk Creek, was with my son on at least several occasions when we spent at least an hour, maybe two-and-a-half, doing nothing but exploring rocks, macroinvertebrates, flowers, other plants, a shale cliff, an interesting juncture between a run-off ditch and the river, birds overhead. I would say we spent at least two-and-a-half hours each time, deeply rewarded. On one occasion, we walked a slate bottom mid-river, when Matt called out to me about rock embedded in that shale which looked like turquoise. I was partly fooled by the looks, too, exclaiming that turquoise surely doesn't exist on the East Coast, and as far as I know, it doesn't. We got a piece out of the river bottom and made sure. Still an interesting anomaly for a slate bottom.

Part of my concern at present is the value of my better photos. Yesterday at Sherman Hoffman, on my way back up the trail from the Passaic River headwater, I was taken by the scintillating burnished brown of something like wheat grass, fully six or seven feet tall. Instantly, I thought of photographing some, and though I did try just to see if there was any sort of hope of cropping an image of any value--no go with this. I looked at the grass again and thought that a painter could do it. A painter, if he were to select the likes of what I looked on as subject, could create a realist painting a camera can't get.

I began to think of my photo collections--I have three big ones I hope to publish as books in the future, collections which continue to grow--as documentary. I've told myself for years now that I don't care if photography is art or not. That's a self-denial or simply a refusal to think about this, since I've been busy otherwise. I may have time to think about it more and come to a conclusion. If all I can offer for three books is documentary, the photos have aesthetic value; I choose and edit them for just that. But it is curious how they just don't draw such an aesthetic response for me right now, as they have for a number of years. Even Lightroom feels too limited. I don't claim to be among the best skilled at using the device, but it just cannot be particular as a paintbrush. 

Passaic River

Blood pressure problem I mentioned in a fairly recent post is solved. Saw my physician this morning; on the way home, I stopped at New Jersey Audubon Sherman Hoffman Preserve, walked a trail to the Passaic River and took some photographs. Here the river is a little trout stream, loaded with browns and rainbows anyone can fish with a fly rod. Signing in at the NJ Audubon shop is required. 

This photo I've posted isn't much. I'm keeping the better for possible use.

I nearly decided not to make the trek that proved much less the effort than I had feared. I would come home and fiddle my riddle instead, just a couple of hours before I would leave for work, but once I walked from a field into woods, I felt that coolness possible to experience only in a woodland, because the air breathed has whatever scents or whatever the stuff is--very subtle--not present in other environments. So rather than the status quo home environment qualifying who I am, I got at least a little of this subtle complexity, and by the river also.

It makes a difference. 

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2014/11/fly-fished-somerset-county-nj-trout.html

Breakfast Chat

She fixed potatoes and I had some. And then sometime later, waffles. Filling and delicious, not as good as talk accompanying the meal.

It was my wife's idea. Old Wooden Bridge Fish Camp on Big Pine Key, 2007. Again in 2012. And now she told me Irma's Eye stormed right through, and she had fears the cottages are gone. I watched the radar representation on TV and it looked like maybe the eye cut through just a little to the north, but maybe I'm mistaken. She had heard it announced Big Pine Key took the heaviest wind.

"Why don't you come out to the reef with us?" I asked. Thinking ahead to next time, in spite of the storm.

"You two are daredevils," she said. My son and I.

I took her out on a rental at Ocracoke, 2005, and she screamed with terror when I clocked the engine towards full throttle.

Conversation touched on a number of things; one of them the hurricane my original family sat out at Southern Shores, North Carolina's Outer Banks, 1976. I was 15 and taken by the storm. I felt a great desire to go out and fish the surf in 75-mph wind. I had fished earlier in the day or the evening before, surf high and pounding, waves at least 10 feet, and what I'm pretty sure was a bluefish slammed the Hopkins I cast, though failed to get hooked. I was hooked. And I later got in an angry fight with my father about going out in that storm. When I calmed down, I realized the situation I had put him in. How could my father let his son go out in a clearly life-threatening storm? I remained sure I would have handled it OK, and I still feel this same way, but of course I understand what the real issue of relationship was.

Fast forward to 1999. This anecdote is a little absurd, but maybe fun. I finally went out in a hurricane. Floyd. It had calmed enough to allow safe driving. Maybe it was the eye. I don't remember. Maybe the end of it. There's a pond in Bernardsville. I've caught bass in muddy water on spinnerbaits. So I cast a spinnerbait...into the eddy of a river. The entire acre or two was one big fast current, besides an eddy.

I was just "messin' around" as J.B. Kasper once remarked about my Opening Day trout fishing effort in 1994. I took offense to Joe's words, but on further reflection later, no, because I prefer not to make the outdoors a duty, if I can avoid that sort of damper on the fun and enlivening spirit. 

Three Bridges to Higginsville

Jorge and I canoed between CR 613 at Three Bridges and the bridge at Higginsville, a distance of little more than a mile, departing at about 8:15 a.m., finishing just after 10:30 a.m. No holes! Besides maybe three or four feet a hundred yards or more upstream of the Higginsville Bridge, and a nice hole at least seven feet deep at the bridge.

In 2012, I drove along the South Branch Raritan River between the bridges, judging no access available, thinking of canoeing this stretch sometime, imagining great spots with big bass. Last night I reviewed my Hunterdon County Hagstrom map, the stretch between Stanton Station and CR 523 too long for us to have paddled it this morning, but it seemed very promising to me, partly because I've got word about bass inhabiting spots along these four miles. I hoped the stretch I had selected wouldn't be too short, and as the morning worked out, including anchoring to test water ahead of us, instead of running over it, the timing was right on the margin.

I caught a largemouth on a #9 Rapala. Jorge caught a smallmouth on a Senko. Both fish from the deep hole at our destination.

This post is short and very lean of substance. Habits, including writing habits of course, get broken, if needlessly, by interruptions. This blog was well kept this year. Last night's post, however, is the first in about a week-and-a-half. Will I come back around and again post more often? I suppose so.

You might think it's not the real world I write about. Surely, you infer irony at that statement, since what I write about is what civilization stands upon--the natural world. If I were no longer able to write about that--the natural world and responses to it--what's the use of the rest, I wonder.

My New Website

Morning

Has been awhile since I last posted. Floating more than a mile of the South Branch Raritan tomorrow morning with Jorge. We've planned this for months.

Cool weather persists and has given this late summer an oddly sort of seashore feeling, if you think of late spring onshore breezes that keep the beach 15 degrees or so chillier than inland. Neither of us will use waders in the morning, but it's rather obvious we could.

Looking ahead to the fall, I plan on fishing the South Branch with leaves florid or near-florid, which for most of you might conjure images of rainbow trout beneath reflections. I'm after smallmouths. I want to get photographs of bass and those colors in the background. I've considered writing a book on small river and stream smallmouths since February or March, and though this isn't a promise, I don't want to fail on at least the experience. Lake Hopatcong third week in October. Mike and I have this plan. 

Cowperthwaite Road to State Highway 28

Matt and I canoed and fished, floating and pulling the canoe through shallow riffles of the North Branch Raritan River, from the iron bridge over the Lamington River at Cowperthwaite Road, through the confluence, and on to State Highway 28, a distance of about two-and-a-half miles total, beginning at about 10:00 a.m., arriving upon The North Branch Bridge shortly after 3:00 p.m. We've had this trip in mind for about 13 years, although Matt doesn't remember as I do. This our first time covering the total distance.

Temperature perhaps 70 degrees when we began, it never seemed to get much warmer, although neither of us ever complained of any chilly discomfort. For late August, water temperature was chilly; I don't believe much warmer than 68.

We were about to shove off, my having remarked that with water this cool, we might do well on plugs, which I don't like to use until late September, even though my experience at catching stream bass after August includes very little. Matt told me he had plugs in his tackle bag, left in his car at The North Branch Bridge, so I volunteered to drive back and get that tackle.

Turned out I never used a plug, and though Matt tried a bit, we caught all 17 of our bass on Senkos.

The trip's highlight happened where we last left off 12 years ago, Matt six-years-old, a nice hole well downstream of the iron bridge. We waded and walked just that far, small planes taking off the end of the local airport runway more and less directly behind underbrush and trees. Matt hooked a smallmouth about eight inches long; a giant bass of 19 or 20 inches--giant for a little stream like this river--rose and followed directly at its frantic tail. "It looked like it was going to eat it," Matt said.

We found several other really nice holes on downstream, each of them inaccessible, except by floating or taking long, brush-burdened hikes. (Some of these stretches, I imagine, don't allow for wading through convenient shallows.) The deepest of these holes--I seriously wondered if it's 12 feet deep; the water was pretty clear, but I couldn't see bottom--features a lot of big carp. Many of them weigh, I believe, 12 pounds, and they are by the dozens.

It was yet another successful outing. I can't remember the last time I went fishing and felt it skunked, even when I've caught nothing.

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