Nothing Freezes a River

 

I had to buy an item at Home Depot, so I threw waders and other gear in the trunk, hoping on a short stint on the way home, but first, I would have a look at the river in town. As you can see, there's a lot of ice on the North Branch, even up in the back of the photo where water moves faster. 

I said as much when I posted the same photo on Facebook, but I added that by what I see, there's no river trout fishing available. Within minutes, Ethan Proffitt commented, "There always is," which felt true to me, like a reminder when closure tried to seal off all the edges in my mind. 

I don't really know. I've seen some really serious ice on the rivers. Today? I wasn't going to bother trying to find any trout where not iced over, but I am 64-years-old and I'm not fishing the Dunnfield Creek--"river" enough--in February where I caught a wild brown from an icy edge when I was Ethan's age. 

I fished Lockatong Creek at 14 degrees in February, too, and though we got skunked that day, we got bait into depths despite a lot of ice.

Besides, I've never heard of anyone doing it, but it's possible to fish through the ice of a river, when it does get seriously thick. It's possible to actually catch trout that way. "There always is."

I'm glad I heard it from someone else. After all, "An Angler Always Finds a Way," means "There always is," and in the more general sense, it means there's nothing that can stop us from making it through whatever resists life from going on.

Nice try for me today. Even nicer a reminder that nothing freezes a river, so you can always give the trout a reasonable effort if you work at it.

Smallmouth on the Jig

Outsmart The Therapist: She Might Keep You in a Box

 We had ice fishing, snow, and zero-degree temps this past December. The photograph is from December 20 years ago, when the likes were more frequent.

The rivers in my area today flowed at good brown trout levels, still slightly stained but coming down from stronger flows after recent rain. I could have got out and tried, but the closest I came to doing that was walking Loki along the Lamington River after disposing of our Christmas tree at Branchburg Park where they make mulch of them. Have been busy with stuff all day afterwards, much of the time administering final touches to my article on South Jersey largemouth bass for The Fisherman next month featuring Thomas Wyatt. 

I do believe we will have a sustained ice season beginning soon. I could be wrong of course, but it's like I can feel it coming, and I've felt this way for a couple of weeks. If so, you'll read some interesting stories, I promise. You might see some ice action on my Litton's Fishing Lines YouTube channel, too, and I hope to get time to put up more of the videos I've already shot. I encourage you to subscribe, but read my disclaimer right here and now: I'm a writer before anything else, and I hope your appreciations remain loyal to the blog. I haven't even figured out how to cut video, let alone do any other edits, and so far, I like the rough and ready feel of straight-out-of-the-box video. Some ice fishing is already up on my old channel Litton's Fishing.

I might have a good sense for when to turn my GoPro on and off. It's just that I usually don't think of filming until it's too late.

This past year was supposed to be the year I got my new website up. Naturally, I got tied up in other projects, although the book on trout fishing I've promised you for years is getting rewritten in my brain. So far. Which isn't to downplay the productivity. (I'll finish it once the new website's up.) Often when I'm on the job, I do the physical labor while working avidly in my head on the book at the same time in another space I do simultaneously. I do this for other projects as well, sometimes whipping out a notebook from my back pocket and shamelessly jotting ideas down. I do put the job first. Anyone who gets hired and doesn't do that is a fool.

My wife says I'm going to miss the people I work with. She doesn't say I'll miss the work, but sometimes I feel as if I will. I always end up concluding I won't actually miss it, but there's plenty to be said for working class jobs when you're a writer otherwise. I remember once reading in Poet's & Writers magazine what I took to be the clear implication of working-class life as being like a death sentence for writers, while I can persuade at long length why it isn't. 

The vast majority of writers need a day job, and I'm sure plenty of us are in the working class. To denigrate what we ourselves do is ultimately unproductive and self-destructive. Instead, we should find our strengths lie in needing to do less than 60 hours a week or more. And rather than devoting all our mental energies to professional performance, we're free to think in our heads what's congruent to identify as writers first. Put the job first, yes, but don't believe you are, personally, that. Take pride in what really amounts to being a "food services worker." The standards you set for yourself. I feel like I'm an act for my eyes only, but the customer satisfaction I produce is that of others. And yet the pride includes the freedom! To be a better writer.

I tried to land a professional job decades ago. While preparing to take one on, I found myself completely lost in procedures. I ended up seeing a psychotherapist, because I was completely baffled at what was wrong with me. She had me take three weeks of IQ testing with another psychologist, which concluded I'm gifted verbally. That shouldn't be surprising, but I tested only average at performance intelligence. That's my problem with jobs that demand high performance intelligence, the psychotherapist concluded smugly. 

I've never felt complete agreement with that as final verdict. I've tried to tell myself I do, but the doubt always swam back up and surfaced. (The psychologists were so certain of their conclusion.) I'll cite examples as to why I think the low score has less to do with genetically hardwired intelligence, and more to do with upbringing. 

When I was five or six, my parents filled a room with papers spread out, doing taxes. I saw that and felt overwhelmed with desire to participate with them in doing the math. Instead, my father chased me out and shut the door on me, which was traumatic, because I so much wanted to do the math. 

Flash forward 10 years or so. 

I have never forgotten my algebra teacher telling me something before I dropped out of the class, failing it. "I know you can do this," she said. She said it in a way that reached me as authentic, and part of me agreed with her in a way that was too deep for me to access, given my conscious conviction at the time that I could not do the math.

Recently, I bought an extra spool for a Penn Fierce reel. I need that to load six-pound mono for fishing rivers and Round Valley shoreline trout. I believed I needed a 1000-series spool. I wasn't certain and knew I wasn't certain. But my reel "had" to be a 1000 series. Logically, that's what fits my five-and-a-half foot rod. Or so I thought. I ordered the 1000 series spool. What do you think I felt as I got notification of its being shipped? Whether or not it would fit the reel.

It came, and the first thing I did was check. It doesn't fit that reel. What did I do next? Looked on the spool loaded with braid on the reel to see if it designates series. Yes. 2000 series.

And that's when I understood. It's not lack of intelligence that didn't "perform" in checking the reel in the first place. It was habit conditioned by deep and lasting traumatization. The reel "had" to be a 1000 series, which is nonsense, and I knew it because I felt unsure. But I was blocked from doing the simple act of checking--psychologically blocked, not because of cognitive lack. I knew it might not be 1000 series. 

It made me certain that the issue of my performance intelligence is psychologically complicated, and that simply taking an IQ test gave us no real conclusion as to its nature in me.  

My next thought was of what to do with the 1000 series spool. I decided to buy a 1000 series Fierce reel and put that reel and the extra spool when I need it on one of my light power St. Croix five-and-a-half foot rods. In addition, I would go ahead and buy a 2000 series spool for the reel on the medium power St. Croix rod of the same length. 

The thought of returning the 1000 series spool and then buying the 2000 series spool didn't sit right with me, because what was just wrong-headed in a helpless way--to have not checked on the series of the Fierce I already owned--would have proven to have been merely foolish if I made it Ereplacementparts' problem. 

Again, I knew I might not have bought the spool to match my reel in the first place, and I had the reel in my possession to check on just what was right, but one is not always a fool when he knows better, not if he's prepared to make good on what amounts to a deep misunderstanding, so I thought one step further and recognized I had the positive use for a 1000 series reel.  

So it is I'll be a little better outfitted in the year ahead.

Bass Encounters   

Another Year at Bottom Fishing Hope for More to Come

There are outings we remember because they signify change in our lives, and yet enjoying action in their midst--or at the end of the day--might trump all else. 

We didn't catch the fish, but caught sight of them just before they sank and swam away. I had hooked something in pretty close. Had got a cast out that fell short, and I left the bait alone for an hour or two, before I decided to reel in the shiner and cast again--farther out. Instead, I was hooked up, but I had to move the fish through a lot of bottom obstruction not fully decayed yet. I did that, and the fish fought freely until it got into more stuff in close, just before I would have hoisted it onto shore. I thought I saw green. Pretty sure it was a largemouth a little over a pound, maybe a pound-and-a-half. 

I baited up and did cast further out there, but I was plenty happy with whatever the fish was.

Our first stop had been The Sporting Life in Whitehouse Station here in New Jersey. A "dozen-and-a-half" shiners were really at least two dozen. I forget the guy's name again, Scott, I think, but I made sure to tip him. You never know if action is going to be fast, so releasing at least a dozen of them at the end of the day just upped the shiner population in Round Valley Reservoir. Matt bought a nonresident, one-day license this year, having come from California. Scott told him he can use the trout stamp any other day, too, but he's flying back on Monday. The nonresident trout stamp cost $20.00. I also renewed my license, and bought a pack of Kalin's jigs.

Temperatures never got above the mid to upper 30's, but wind was very light at most. I wore my new Beyond Allta Polar L8 Parka. Matt asked me what it's rated for, so I checked on my phone, finding it's good down to minus 70 F. Outdoor Life magazine says it's the warmest coat on the market. I felt like it was 90 degrees out, so I kept the coat unzipped for the most part. I wouldn't have paid the regular price of $595.00, not because the parka isn't worth that, but because the $219.00 sale price was a great deal in the range I was looking for. You would think you could pay a few thousand for parkas good for Antarctica and the arctic, but I haven't seen them online. Maybe I would just need to look harder. Mine is filled with Primaloft Gold, not down. Primaloft manages better if the coat gets wet. The Beyond website recommends sizing down once or twice, because the coat is made to accommodate four layers of clothes underneath it. I was willing to get a large instead of the usual extra-large, but my wife insisted I stay with the status quo. It is a little bulky, and I wore a base layer, a fleece sweatshirt, and a wool shirt underneath today, but it never felt as if cold air was getting underneath or bulky in an uncomfortable way. I like the feel of its presence, and I guess my wife was right. 

Especially because of what follows. I never got Cronk's hunting bib back to him after using it ice fishing three years ago, and it seems as if he doesn't care and has no use for it himself. (Still have to bring it to his attention.) I can put that bib on over layers underneath, and the Allta L8 over all that, no problem. Doubt I could do that with a merely large coat. 

Eager to put it to more tests yet.

After going on four hours, it was time to begin packing out. 

"There's a fish on this rod," I said, observing the tightened line from one of the 11-foot noodle rods I like to use here, getting a little better casting range. 

Earlier I had put a shiner pretty far out there. 

Matt came over and fought the fish, which almost got stuck in a clump of vegetation that includes some stems sticking above water surface yards from the edge. He got it through and almost to the bank when the hook came loose. The fish wallowed on the surface a long moment, and that, I thought, was behavior like a pickerel's, not a trout's. But I caught sight of how the back of the fish curved, and the orangish fins, concluding that it probably was a small laker of about 16 to 18 inches. 

The guys over from us caught a pickerel, a yellow perch or a bass, and a nice rainbow. 

Next year Matt's girlfriend, Kaitlin, visits, so we'll do something as a family, not fishing, although Matt is fully confident he and I will get back to the reservoir as yet.

Last Year

2025 Indeed

 

Converted to Kalin's Jigs for River Trout

Texted Noel Sell from work yesterday. He lives in Pennsylvania but knows North Jersey. He phoned me and we talked about a river. Made me realize I could get out for a short time in the morning, and I committed to doing so straight away. 

River wasn't high or off color. Water was cold but probably milder than last I got out two weeks ago during the cold snap. Air temperature was about 41 when I caught the trout at 11 a.m., after casting some 25 minutes including a break to get the photo below. Yesterday temperatures got into the 50's, and such spells of mild weather do increase water temperature, though it came down a bit last night.

Thus far, I've caught only one river trout with the air temp at 39, none in weather colder. Have only caught wild trout in a creek, colder, besides ice fishing once...with Noel. 

I hear a lot about worms lately. I haven't been fishing a whole lot, but I remain in communication with people who fish, though they, too, haven't been fishing. Besides, of course, what I see on social media. Garden worms are great. Pink Berkley worms drifted, too. 

I like my jigs. But I am so relieved the Kalin's brand I buy at The Sporting Life work. (The link works if you're on Facebook. The shop has no website of its own I found.) The marabou is a little shorter than the marabou on a Haggerty's jig. Naturally, if you're paying a whole lot less, it's understandable if the manufacturer is saving cost on marabou, relative to what Haggerty's puts out. But really, if length were a determining factor in the interest trout take in these jigs, then why not experiment with a full three inches of tail? Why not four inches? Some of us do make our own jigs. 

It probably gets absurd real fast. And not only will trout hit a Kalin's with a little less marabou--they'll hit a Kalin's jig with some of it's marabou pinched off, which is what I inadvertently did when taking leaves off the hook. I thought of tying on another jig, but something told me to keep that jig with a shortened tail on the line. Sure enough, I caught the trout within five minutes.

I kept fishing. The river isn't wide and I got casts almost on the opposite bank. I made one of those casts, began reeling, and had a good one on. It came up, rolled on the surface, and lost the hook. 

I kept fishing. Another one struck almost at my boots and didn't get hooked. That's what the first one did, too, leaping three or four times before I got the net under it. Fifteen-and-three-quarter inches. 

So today I've felt fully converted to Kalin's, which, again, is a good thing, because I'd not only rather spend my money at the local tackle shop; I sure as hell don't care to spend $4.75 apiece for Haggerty's! I paid a lot less two years and some months ago for that brand, but though I've looked, I haven't found anything like $18.00 for six jigs and shipping online recently. 

Jigged

 

Beasts, Gods, Bass, and the Meaning of the Higgs Boson

I doubt the rivers are high, even though significant rain fell yesterday, but I'm not going back out there in the cold and wind. I did a version of that last week, and while this week wouldn't be the same--of course not--I don't care. I thought of heading over to Round Valley for a photo shoot. It's been many weeks since I've done one, and since my suspicion is that the water's got rather low, I'd like to at least hear that from someone. 

The sky is perfectly blue, too.

Turns out I asked Google last night if firmware updates for digital cameras--my Nikon D850 and D7100--are important. AI told me they're "very important," and though I could find no evidence that my image quality will improve, I'm going to look deeper into the issue of the latest firmware for each camera. 

In other news of the day, my day off, Jim Hutchinson at The Fisherman asked me if a January 13 deadline for a feature about South Jersey largemouths will work. (I'm interviewing Thomas Wyatt who does especially well.) Told Jim I'll contact Wyatt. I'm sure it will work out, but since I have another deadline for Jim coming up on February 1st for a Hotspot article about the Pequest River, I figure I might as well go ahead and get started. The interview for that one Gerry Dumont and I already did, when we also talked about the Musconetcong. The Musconetcong story is published online, but I believe you need a Fisherman subscription to access it.

Good reason to go ahead and subscribe. Eh? 

I guess every year about this time, I look back over it's course. I began last year fishing the river trout, though I also ice fished Cranberry Lake at the end of January and did well with pickerel. Caught a trout in February, and though I caught nothing at all in March, I caught plenty of stocker trout in April and some largemouths. Loads of largemouths and some pickerel in May, some trout, a salmon, big crappie, few panfish. In June Brenden Kuprel and I tried once for muskies, but on that day I ended up catching 15 largemouths on Senko-type worms. 

It's really not all about the fish. I'd say more about months that followed, but all of my outings besides a couple very short ones are posted about. We honor fish. I certainly don't discount that. Fishermen call them "beasts," feeling the power of big ones. One of my curiosities is the relationship between beasts and gods. And one of the things I notice about beasts is their close affinity with mythic gods, though with one big difference--beasts actually exist. Or do they? Species exist. A beast is something indefinite, or perhaps the behavior of a large animal when it inspires awe. 

In that sense, Paleolithic men experienced beasts before species became recognized. 

Many believe in God, though I know of no one but a Wiccan woman who believes in gods and goddesses in the plural. I believe God is the information that etches itself into existence, the result being a real world. Like the DNA of things, only that it also assumes our personal qualities on a larger scale than our own, so that the world--indifferent to us otherwise--has the potential to receive our addresses and answer back to us.

Maybe the "etching" is just the Higgs boson subatomic particle. I'd ask my son.

Some would say my notion of God as information suggests that we live in a simulation, but to believe we live in a simulation is to divest the world of truth. I believe the etching itself results in all the flourishing substances that make up a tangible world. It's that very tangibility--the materiality of things like water--that assures us when we value such active presence that it's real. And yet even though our very life is supported by things in the world out there, there is no care for us on its part, no meaning for us besides our own responses and the address we launch through each of our own life projects.

Mine isn't all fishing. I'm just as interested in what my thinking produces, as I am in what my fishing line connects me to. Either way, I wonder. But then, I get the hint of an answer from the very angle from which I cast a doubt, hot on the retrieve in an instant. 

What's the use? Well, if you ask a physicist who spends day after day at a task practiced some 40 or 50 years now to no avail, he'll say that when we do create more energy from nuclear fusion than put into the reaction process, we'll solve a lot of the energy problem. It's always thinking...that solves problems, which should be a no brainer for anyone,

Some think thinking is God, as everything we humans address and respond to amounts to recognition. Or more to the point, that no God exists. Only the thinking in each individual brain amounts to qualities we formerly gave "God." 

Even the Higgs boson has no meaning other than what we give it. Perhaps the Higgs boson never existed until we delineated its form, allowing it to function just so, as if indeed it has a meaning.

Does the intellect etch the identity of things into existence? I still believe God does that. Not as any Creationist's design, but as the source of the meaning we endow the world with. A differentiated, no less flourishing, existence indifferent to us, though difference itself implies the meaning we do find. Anyone who believes man's intellect "etched" the fossil remains of Tyrannosaurus rex, having "etched" millions of years into the past, is inviting intellectual chaos rather than any meaning.  

"What is the meaning of this?!" 

Do bass behave just so, in such a way that we can answer the question regarding what they are? To the degree we do know them. Every week it seems a new technique addresses something new about the fish.

Anyhow, I did catch a 20-incher this year, photographed below. Late July, I believe that was. Another was 19 3/4 inches, another 19, and one other might have been 19, didn't measure the latter fish. Every year I catch a number of 18-inchers, and this year was an exception of maybe fewer than usual. 

The walleye? Weighed in at Dow's at five-pounds, 15-ounces. The third walleye I've weighed in there at just that same weight.  

 

Big Day in May

Winter Choices for Fishing in New Jersey

Water at Wintertime Temperatures

After I shot the photo, the sun never came back out until after I had waded far downstream and come back up. I had hoped sun would be on the water, because I think winter trout like that. The water is at wintertime temperatures, as calm areas out of the flow are iced over. Air temperature was 38 and 37, which isn't much colder than the low 40's that have been productive for me.

Downstream, I caught a trout last February. Some snow was on the banks. Just because nothing hit there today doesn't mean none exist. It's probably more than the weather being cold. A front was moving through, wind speed about to increase, and that could have turned them off. Maybe next time. Before I left about 11:45, Fred Matero texted me and expressed interest in going January or February. 

I had nightcrawlers leftover from Lake Hopatcong in the fridge, and I hoped to use them, but they're dead. I'm kind of on the fence about nightcrawler or garden worm use, anyhow. I had figured I'd jig the rivers for awhile, getting used to the fishery, and then move on to fly fishing. Fishing live worms seems a step backwards, but I have a good memory of using them on the Dunnfield in February, the ground snow-covered many years ago when using worms was legal. They sure worked. 

Maybe Fred will buy a few dozen bloodworms in Ocean County, and we'll try those.

When I did make my way back upstream, a kingfisher flew into plain view a couple of yards or so over the river, something between its beak. A really astonishing sight. When I was trying to get another photo of the millhouse--as if sunlight might poke between clouds--I saw a pair of bald eagles circling overhead. 

While loading my car, I heard a popping crack, looked up, and saw a tree falling. Wind speed hadn't increased much as yet, not like what I experienced at the next spot.

I drove on downstream, planning on driving directly home that way, but when I came into view of my spot, I braked, turned, and parked. I figured it would be interesting, because I've never been skunked there on first try during either of the past two years. Perhaps the likelihood of trout being there remains high. 

The water was noticeably low. I wondered if that would make a critical difference, and I got into position and began casting, the wind making that difficult, the wind very heavy and steady, my right hand getting chilled severely. 

Nothing hit. 

I felt perhaps more satisfaction in getting skunked, given how sure I am trout remain in the two spots where I've caught them previously. If so, the trout aren't total yes-fish, hitting anytime.

Deep Natural Connection

Thought I Got Snagged, Until the Trout Took Drag

Catching fall stockers from our rivers has never been easy for me. 

There've been only a couple of times the past two years when I caught three of them on an outing. I haven't really fished the fall stockers over the course of fall and winter until two years ago, but I did find they cooperate with a thorough approach, after I decided that would be with an ultralight spinning rod and a black marabou jig. 

I fly fish too. That's the only way I fished them in the fall for a while, though that amounted to one or two outings a season. I wasn't successful, besides having a nice one break off a Woolly Bugger. Spinning might be proxy for my fly rods. Maybe I'll switch out the spinning rod for my two-weight or more likely my five-weight. Maybe I'm just learning the rivers before I approach the trout in a more difficult way.

But the rivers are plenty difficult as is. A couple of game wardens checked on me at Three Bridges. They weren't happy with my black Lab, Loki, but for good reason. Loki's growl sounds like a lion; his bark is deep and loud. 

"Restrain your dog, in case someone else comes down," I was told. 

But before the man on my left who almost got his hand bitten, having attempted to pet Loki's head, had told me to do that, I asked about witness to any action of the fishing kind. 

"We saw some caught late in October," the other man said. "Not after that."

"I'm sure they're still a few laying around out there," I said.

"Yeah." 

I've caught river trout in February, which is a stretch from October. 

You can always count on some being somewhere. A week or so before Opening Day one year, the state hadn't stocked the North Branch Raritan's AT&T stretch yet. By studying the water, I saw no trout, until I spotted one about 18 inches long. The only trout I saw in the clear water. 

Some of these fall stockers probably holdover into the next fall, though it's true that a large number of them get taken the first week or so after stocking. After that first week, most of the fishermen quit on them, though. I saw no one else fishing today. 

I like the feeling of joy in barren solitude. Even when nothing gets caught, I know it might be possible to hook one, until I leave the river alone for the day. Time and again experience has proven it happens, but if you're not happy with one or two trout, stick to springtime's smaller fish. 

I'm even happy with a fish that throws the hook. 

At Three Bridges, I began by casting under the bridge. At one point, I got snagged, and I made my way upstream along the wall of the bridge to finally pull the jig free. All the while I called out to Loki, trying to reassure him. Even though he's a Lab, he doesn't swim, and he was out of my sight. Imagine had the two wardens come jaunting in on the scene when I was under that bridge! Loki would have gone mad. 

After I talked to the wardens, I held Loki by the leash and made my way upstream, to a range of water I think is about six feet deep; maybe it's only five. I fished it persistently, and once when I believed I'd got snagged, the great trout suddenly ploughed forward, bending the rod further and taking drag for a second. 

Trout in the River but None on the Hook