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

Millstone River's Fishery

Here's a link to an excellent article by NJ state fisheries biologist Sean Crouse. The Millstone River is very compelling, and electroshock fishing sure brings some mystery to light, but far from all of it. Also today, Fred Matero informed me that the drawdown of Columbia Lake related to the demolition of Columbia Dam is underway now.

http://www.njfishandwildlife.com/artmillstone.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery 

Expected Rising Rainbow Trout

Matt told me today or last night that twice recently he checked on the local river (North Branch Raritan) at Miller Lane, witnessing rising rainbow trout at sundown. Since he couldn't get off work by 3:30 as we assumed he would when we made plans, we didn't go to Tilcon Lake, but over here to Matt's spot instead, fly casting.

We got there almost two hours before sundown, any trout ignoring our dry flies, so I switched to a worm fly, then to a beadhead black stonefly size 12, because I wanted to get down near bottom fast and stay there. I'm pretty sure I had a trout on, because whatever I hooked moved, though it is possible that was a sunken stick. I never felt the pulsation of a fish. Whatever it was that got hooked moved aside, then came off.

We saw a couple of trout make splash rises, but they never came up in the great numbers Matt had seen. Nor did we see much of a hatch. Had we seen a definite hatch, we would have seen trout come up for the bugs.

Water remains very chilly. Trout fishing should be good--sometimes--for awhile yet.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2017/04/peapack-brook-fast-action-with-rainbow.html

Round Valley Wind and Fish

My Sunday off, Matt had to work at noon. After we had breakfast in Chester as a family, I spent part of the afternoon getting a relay for my car's air conditioner. Not available in Somerville, me misled to Hillsborough and finally dealing with a couple of good people at Autozone Bound Brook, it took awhile, but my family got to Round Valley Reservoir after 6:00, feeling as if enjoying a late October day, chilly wind building water up in Ranger Cove.

I focused on two corners where whatever stuff carried by wave action would go no further. I used the same worm I recently caught my Mount Hope Pond bass on. Matt began with a 5/8th-ounce buzzbait, catching a little rock bass. I've never before seen such a little fish smack such a big lure and get caught. He switched to a spinnerbait, and in the meantime, I caught a rock bass almost 10 inches long on that worm, and then a little largemouth of about seven inches.

We walked further back to the next corner where I've caught bass before. When the reservoir was full. Matt cast from a point existing as an edge between wave action and quiet water of the cove-like corner, catching an 11-inch smallmouth bass. I stood and cast far downwind from him, catching another big rock bass, and then a largemouth of about nine inches. Matt walked down to face the wind with me and missed a hit.

I had the sense the fish were pretty active and vulnerable to a variety of lures, compared to when the typical blue skies and calm surface makes them scarce.

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

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Providence: That's Another Big Idea to Name a Place

My second-biggest Mount Hope Pond bass, caught during a 2013 lunch break. The very biggest weighed maybe an ounce or two more, but I caught it when first light was just breaking and the photos didn't come out very well.

I got out my handwritten fishing log, confirming that 2014 was the last I visited Mount Hope, reviewing shortly all the outings, and beginning to think on the value I place on this pond and region, realizing that, actually, limited to so many lunch breaks of about half-an-hour--though I noticed one gave me an hour-and-a-half--my fishing here seemed almost superficial, compared to what it can be. I keep a "Notes" margin in the notebook I use for this fishing log going back to 1975, and noticed one day I "wasn't right," probably rattled by work, but in spite of tight time and business casual clothing, though I wore hiking boots, I really did realize a lot of value.

During one lunch break, I not only remembered myself at age 17; involving total commitment to fishing I exercised at that age, in some sense I became the person I had been, this a literal impossibility, but we all have an inkling of what it is to re-experience events amounting to who we have been, a matter of existing for a little while within the interior space of former self as more than memory of past time. That was a very healthy span of moments during which I regained lasting vitality. Fishing can seem a stupid pursuit. So you catch a fat fish like that in the photo above. Big deal. And besides, what have you really done, besides disturb the peace of that creature you've chosen to dominate? Wonders never cease, and every angler I know is fascinated in getting close, not only to nature in general, but specifically in getting close to fish, because they are worthy, magnificent creatures to behold. Only the worst of us, those who don't deserve the title angler, treat catches with disrespect. And yet there's a whole lot more to angling than methods and fish. As the contemplative practice angling is, there's no limit to the potential of realization, and this vitality I mention of my getting in touch with some five years ago is still with me, not only because I once was, in fact, 17, but because at 52 I tapped back into that age. This isn't to confuse ages 17, 52, and 57, but to cite the fact that health and energy have a lot to do with personal identity as an actual dynamic you can only engage through concrete practice, specific practice you value deeply through a long biographical history of experience.

Good reason to go fishing alone sometimes. And persistently, as I did at Mount Hope. Because with someone else or others along, you can't get as in touch with yourself.

After this recent Mount Hope venture and getting out that log, which resulted in a chain reaction of thinking, I thought of people financially well-off, people fishing from nice bass boats, fishing reservoirs and lakes full of bass over five pounds. Even here in Jersey, Steve Vullo scores bass that big consistently, and as for this matter of owning a boat and avoiding mosquitos or at least ticks, I own a nice squareback canoe and can fish most of the spots Vullo attends. That is, if the condo association doesn't crack down when I bring my canoe back home after its temporary asylum from their scrutiny.

So why Mount Hope? Come on, the place is for losers, right? Oh, there's some nice bass, no one might dispute photo evidence, but not as nice as bass Vullo catches. All I have to do is...make the effort. That's what I was writing about in the previous post, effort, and I can take my own words to Manasquan Reservoir, and then...I can catch bass like Steve does. (With a whole lot more trial and effort ahead of that effort, because Steve seems to catch them like no one else.)

Hopeless romantic, here we go again. Why don't I just create a Facebook site so people can post fish pictures and do away with all my words, since most fishermen around here never read.

I worship that place. Mount Hope. And it's not just the pond. That town and region. The Mount Hope Historical Park too. There's ultimately something downright weird about all this, or, there is when I shoot straight to the bottom of the issue, where nothing but a great unknown is met to create mythological overtone. At least one of the mine shafts at the Historical Park drops more than 2000 feet straight down to bedrock. If you read the post about our hike there and the full day, you might agree there's something weird at least about that outing: http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2012/11/mount-hope-historical-park-hike.html At the least, the post is a very entertaining read that might make you wonder if Jim Morrison was along for the ride. Got to keep on riding, because the Roadhouse is never reached unless it is spiritual more than movie setting, and a most specifically pertinent line to that post I linked you to is spoken by Morrison on An American Prayer. That outing actually did happen. Of course it did; there are the photos, but what I mean by actuality suggests the spiritual dimension of that day as a whole lot more than imagined. My "random" choice of the Winston c.d., which the post briefly discusses--the post is an understated piece of writing for sure--before the events of that trip culminated with my shooting the photo of the screech owl, this so-called random or merely personally selective choice of a c.d. foreshadowing the screech owl shot could not possibly have occurred without meaning visiting us from above; at least, this is my firm opinion, confirmed likewise by many other events over the course of my life. And besides, at Mount Hope Historical Park, before we hit the road and I got the Winston out to play, I shot a photo of a bird house in which a screech owl could have comfortably fit. A foreshadow even further back than the music I selected.

Is Jim Morrison dead? Remember the Renaissance of the Doors? At least here on the East Coast, the Renaissance of the Doors began late in 1980. Radio announcers on WMMR Philadelphia and etc. promoted the event, which persisted as a sort of underground cultural phenomenon for at least three or four years, I think, accompanied by what might impress us today as a very strange question: Is Jim Morrison dead? Of course he's dead. Physically.

It's too weird to say more. But the post I linked you to does say a lot more without any of this direct address I indulge in this present post. The linked-to post is an account that leaves the reader to his own inference. And it's a very sad and dangerous affair that people today let the mind go to titillate their trivial pleasure by teasing information of random sorts.

I'm just not a straight bassman. I'm not a bassman at all. I leave that designation to social circles I don't include myself among, which is no bad reflection on iBass360, or on Steve; just the opposite, since I can better respect others when I distinguish my own differences.

I can hit a target, though. The theme of casting in my last post. And no one can develop certain casting skills while sitting or standing in any boat. They require that you get in among sticks from shore. But I'm just not all about targeting bass or targeting other fish. Fishing for me is peace. Not targets and war. I like to fill out experience with meaning, and to be quite frank, the edge of a fallen branch where I want my worm to penetrate the surface isn't a "target." Sure, I see it by aid of abstract discrimination to get the worm exactly where I want it to go, but to overuse "target" as an aggressive attitude is completely contrary to the Zen this practice of mine always seems to begin amounting to. In Zen archery you shoot blind. You don't aim for the target, and yet, if you become a Master, you're more accurate than any warrior.

Mount Hope. What a symbol. There's even a bridge on the Rhode Island coast near Providence called the Mount Hope Bridge. Odd. No mountains nearby. Is it a seacoast ridge or other? Mount Hope Bay near Narragansett Bay.

Providence. That's another big idea to name a place.

Mount Hope Pond Revisted

Bass are hard to catch at Mount Hope Pond. They always have been. As my son and I set out along the western shore today, eventually working almost all the way into the back from the front of the pond near the swimming beach, this was the first time I've been up there at the 18-acre pond since 2014. I told Matt to expect two hits per hour on average, and today we went a little under par, but I am fully convinced the fish are there in completely comparable numbers to when I discovered this pond in 2011. We sighted about as many as used to be normal. I also told him that the few bass caught usually measure 16, 17, 18 inches, but the single fish I caught today was more like 13 inches, though I hooked another a lot bigger.

This fishing means getting back into the sticks. Not only that; it means getting stuck by them. It also calls on accurate pitching and casting. I physically showed Matt what this demands by parting brush, standing on a sloping and uneven bank from which I could have taken a dunk, and pitching the worm, never quite working out how I might set the hook, should a bass have taken it, and yet staying open to the thought. You do not want to break your rod on a branch, at least not if that rod is an expensive St. Croix like mine. Matt got the idea right away, went through the thick, sighted a bass he thought was five pounds, pitched, watched the bass vacuum his eight-inch Chompers worm into its maw and just as quickly force it back out.

I've seen only one bass that big here over the course of some two dozen or more visits, but I bet a six- or seven-pound fish exists that may never get caught. I've caught a couple that were probably over four pounds, fat 19 1/2-inchers, but don't get your hopes up if you're thinking of traveling I-80 and getting there. Mount Hope Pond is the best symbol I have of the sort of hope I live on, but it's tough, solitary, and with rewards infrequent yet a little outsized, it demands that hard effort to achieve, which most of us don't care for, but is dependable.

That's no slight against my friends. So many of you who read these accounts. I would be lost without you, and yet I go my own way. An angler always finds a way because he exercises his own judgment. That never means I don't confer with others'.

I doubt but very few others, however, catch bass here. Let alone any over five pounds. Who wants to get back into his car, scratched, and covered by mosquito bites, risking the infection of his comfortable vehicle by the dozen or so ticks crawling all over his clothes? It takes an unusual character to enjoy this kind of fishing. The sort used to nature's difficulty lifelong. The mosquitos bothered me little, a mysterious immunity that clearly seems to have to do with my habit of being out there among them, but when I finally took a good look at my son after hearing his complaints, my first thought was that maybe I had a medical emergency on my hands. His arms, his neck, were pocked all over by swollen welts, and yet he wanted to keep fishing. After the encounter with a true lunker. He knows how to judge size.

I blogged persistently about the fishing here. When especially the post I link to began racking up big visitation numbers--more than 1270 have visited this single post, out of more than a dozen others on the pond--I felt afflicted by awful guilt. I related this feeling to a friend. He couldn't have quite understood how it felt. I had spot-burned my own best secret. Fishing seemed to get worse and this state of affairs just added to the "wrong" I had done, but as the years moved relentlessly on, I began to come back around to where I began with this blog, my feeling that information never really hurts. Ignorance hurts. And I began to feel a deep longing to come back up here and see if I am right.

My feeling grew that Mount Hope had persevered. Even though I hadn't been back up there to gain any hard evidence, I've plenty of evidence from many sources stored in my brain. Even as a teenager, when I began writing about where to catch fish and getting these articles published, I learned right off the bat that despite big feature titles spelling out where to go, very few people--if anybody--takes the advice by feet and hands. This is not at all to discount practical pointers, but the entertainment value of writing ranks foremost along with aesthetic value, and above all else, by formalizing information, it becomes part of the culture we all share. Knowledge doesn't trivialize. That awful disparaging sense of overfamiliarity is an illusion, not knowledge. It's caricature, not character. A bad mental habit of sloth, inaction, and the wrong assumptions about freedom. (You are not anybody's slave, nor are you under the lock of any institution or job.) Ultimately, my pieces protect and serve Mount Hope Pond. They celebrate, mythologize, and cite the value of this place.

The bass are still there. Out of 1279 visitations of that post linked alone, it's possible a few bass were caught and released as the result. Maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe some people have taken my advice and fully enjoyed themselves. Is that wrong, of course not. Since when do anglers have an attitude like radical environmentalists against the human species? Whatever is the case, bass are here.

I haven't reread this post linked to, but by how I remember it, I wasn't as good as I am now of telling it like it is. I probably wrote about the need to get back in the sticks, but a reader glosses over that and just thinks I'm telling him to follow a trail into the woods. Catching bass consistently here is hard to do.

That said, yeah, there may a few of you who, like me, find it relatively easy to make an effort and cast and pitch with an ever-growing sum of accuracy. One thing for sure: Do not tell me the craft of the cast is limited to fly fishing.

Mount Hope Pond's west side is pocked all over by schist. Wear hiking boots if you come here and rely on steady feet.

Part the brush and get into position.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2012/05/mounthope-pond-offers-chance-at-lunker.html