New Jersey Outdoor Alliance to Host Feast

The grassroots New Jersey Outdoor Alliance mission involves stewardship of the state's environment while championing fishing, hunting and trapping among policy leaders, opinion makers and the public. They have an online legislative action format from which anyone can participate, and I suggest you go to http://capwiz.com/njoutdooralliance/home/ and before you finish reading, click on and read the Chairman's message to get an idea of how politically effective as NJ outdoor participants we are.

And NJOA serves great food, an opportunity like I've never seen before.

On Sunday, March 13th, beginning at 4:00 pm, the Aichem family of chefs at the Black Forest Inn, 249 U.S. Highway 206 in Stanhope, is serving NJOA a feast of venison, wild boar, pheasant, turkey, freshly caught fish and more. This is an opportunity to meet pro-outdoors state legislators, officials from NJ hunting, fishing and pro-outdoors organizations which comprise NJOA Conservation Foundation, and to support the NJOA grassroots effort. Tickets stand at $100.00 per person.

Chris Lido sent us information, and I wrote back that I was thinking of coming. "Bruce, the food alone is worth more than the price," he wrote back. I told him I agree, but we're going to wait until next year--and I hope this event is hosted again--since, well, the economy just isn't as good as MSNBC sometimes makes it seem. 

River Styx Parallels: Could be Ice Fishing's End this Year

Joe Landolfi invokes the spirit of Bob Neals.

Can't remember specifically when I last fished a really mild day on the ice, but they've always been enjoyable in a sort of special way. Yesterday, four of us came to Hopatcong, five of us including Tracy, who joined later, and Jason's Doberman and my Labrador in addition to us. Ice five and six inches thick had not yet begun to rot, except at the very surface, which allowed for good boot traction. Temperatures rose to at least 60, felt a lot warmer, and as usually happens, the lake region felt vibrantly alive with social activity. Other people came and visited us, and a tavern on the northern side of the bridge bustled actively with guests outside happy to pay keen attention to goings-on atop the hardwater.

This is Lake Hopatcong's River Styx, ultimately named by an ancient Greek for the boundary between our life and the underworld after death. I had come in my car, Joe in Jason's. And then Homer arrived, or so I learned by chance this is Paul's nickname. River Styx happens to be the last place Odysseus visited on his return home in Homer's great ancient Greek The Odyssey. Homer seemed every bit as full of stories as is a writer, but he tells them, just as The Iliad and The Odyssey began as oral traditions. He and I sat in foldout chairs and I felt refreshed to hear such a high and precise vocabulary speak. I look forward to a Delaware River float trip in the future, which Paul and friends do every year in kayaks. Homer's known Joe since Joe was teenaged, both of them growing up in Berkeley Heights. I plan on buying two kayaks this year.

Currents in our culture do run as deep as ancient time, but you have to get close to nature to connect. Nevertheless, a name given to a place can really help, although the full history of that name, including its modern application, implies the complexity of modern responses on many levels compared to only the very deepest.

As always, I'm amazed at Joe's expressiveness, Joe with a natural actor's talent and many others besides. At one point, Homer and I traversed ice together and as we conversed, he said, "Joe has so much talent, he could have done anything."

As I set nearly 15 tip-ups, I caught Joe, about 20 yards to my side setting another, glancing skyward, calling out, "In the name of Bob Neals, let's catch some fish!" So here we have River Styx, Homer, and an invocation as if to the gods, just like the ancient Greeks, all of this spontaneous, without my mentioning the parallel between this narrow cove of Hopatcong and the ancients, until at one later point I did find it appropriate to voice an attribution. But after all, however and whoever decided to name this section of the lake, the fact remains that the source of the name is very long ago, yet central to Western Civilization, and although America is something new, the constitution never could have been written without the studied work of British philosopher John Locke, nor could Locke have produced his philosophy without the ancient Greek Aristotle prior to him.

Bob Neals died last year from cancer, only in his 50's. Homer pointed to a brown house about 200 yards from where we sat, on the bank of River Styx not very far from where it enters Crescent Cove, telling me that Neals had lived in it for a while. Neals was Joe's ice fishing mentor, who once told him, in 20-degree weather, to place his bare hands in the water exposed by a cut hole, and then wring them out in the wind, so they won't feel cold for the rest of the outing. Neals caught the New Jersey state record, 42-pound, 13-ounce muskellunge through the ice of Monksville Reservoir, and I'm told this fish is the world record ice-caught muskellunge.

The legacy of Bob Neals persists among New Jersey freshwater anglers and surely will remain with us for many years yet to come. But during at least the past decade, the name Dante Dimarco eclipses the record-holder's on Lake Hopatcong. No one else catches more muskies here. All of you who read my blog know about my literary excesses, and sometimes I feel they distract from straight-forward fishing facts, as I know they piss off some of my readers sometimes. But frankly, if you just want straight scoop: 1. I write a lot of conventional fishing articles for magazines and often post those later on my blog, once the rights restrictions clear: 2. There must be thousands of other fishing websites out there that work within narrow limitations on language. 

I don't insult your intelligence, so stick to my posts. 

Now that I've created enough distance from mention of the modern-day Dante so as to not disrespect what he does, in keeping with this ordinary yet seemingly weird day on the lake, I have something else to add. First, it was not a weird day at all. I write of deep cultural currents, and obviously such were with us today, but the better anyone gets at navigating the likes, the less awesomely they confront the traveler who becomes better acquainted over time with history as not really linear, as if the past is "behind" us and only exists as a timeline we fill with references no longer existing. It's all here now. But this means: as history actually was, say about 2500 years ago, that of course is not physically present--as was. It is physically or spiritually--on some level the same--present as is. Different from as was, but something essential must in fact persist and is with us.

Dante Alighieri was a poet, 1265-1321, author of The Divine Comedy. He lived many years after ancient Greeks came up with River Styx, now a sector of this glacial lake which in fact has existed since long before ancient Greeks explained their sense of how things go for the dead. River Styx was already long here where we ice fished today, when whichever individual Greek came up with the word naming it. But it wasn't a river-like passage from the main lake to Crescent Cove as it is today, because the modern-day Lake Hopatcong water level is elevated 12 feet by a dam. River Styx is no more than eight feet deep coming in near the bridge and mostly shallower, although it is deeper near the main lake. We've appropriated the waterway. And we've appropriated the name of it for reasons unknown to me, but everything designated by words has weird poetic logic. As if it fits together to help form the structure of an epic. Underneath "reality" at the surface. Not as if daily trends aren't real, but they don't comprise everything.

The poet Dante was a Christian. The ancient Greeks, pagan. But I've always felt Dante bore greatly intimate knowledge of the Greeks who lived long before him, and when I read The Inferno, the first of the epic poem's three parts, I felt as if Dante's greatest moment was in viewing the Palace--in hell--of philosopher Aristotle. Perhaps I only felt this, as a young man, because I identify with whom the Middle Age's philosophers named The Philosopher, but it seemed to me as if Dante was telling me he felt the same. Aristotle only went to hell, according to those in the know, because he was not here on earth after Christ made going to heaven possible.

Jason caught a few perch jigging; that's all the fish we caught.

Just before I had to leave early, letting Joe care for my tip-ups and power auger so the rest of them could fish to dark, and then again another day, I caught sight of Marty Roberts checking out our scene from the bridge. He's featured in the post about the sunglasses story.  I hadn't seen him since that October 2012 day on the lake, nor had Joe, although Marty had tried to get in touch with me from Laurie's shop a couple of times when told by her that I was out on the lake with my son.

Regarding Marty, this miracle hybrid striper catcher, there's also a way to tread that line between disrespect and mythic comparison for the sake of waking up to possibilities that might make us greater. A lot of us who fish disdain high culture as effete and removed from reality, but I rarely meet an angler without a wide-ranging knowledge of rock 'n roll. Steely Dan's "Home at Last," for example, is an homage to Homer and his Odyssey. The list of rock references to high literature would go on for pages. Why do rock lyricists care? Because many of them, highly intelligent, are inspired by forms of art other than that which they compose. They understand that rock is a community, and that all communities thrive by incorporating ideas from other communities. Modern-day philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand--who claimed she owed a single literary and intellectual debt, to Aristotle--wrote affectionately about a story character, Marty. I know them both. I know something about them both the same.

So much for poet's license today. We like to live our lives as if we belong to newspapers. Or now, as if we belong to the web. Either way, newspapers or the web, facts are certainly in question now as they certainly were not only 30 years ago or so before the web's prevalence. It's the beginning of a new age now, and we're uncertain what it is and how to go about human relations. I know I take an edgy risk when I write posts like this one, because it can shake up readers' sense about how events really are and who really occupies them. Some readers designate me a hopeless crank or resent what seems my distortion of character. But read this post again, if you wish. It's pretty straight-forward. I didn't make anything up. I reported on Joe invoking the presence of Bob Neals, though Neals is dead. I never suggested to Joe that he start behaving like ancients invoking gods. He did it spontaneously. I wrote about Paul, who has been called Homer for many years, in fact, but I met him today for the first time. That's River Styx we stood on. Students of literature think the dead are ferried across River Styx by Charon, but who's to say the boat couldn't have floated upriver to a boundary between the river and a cove, as if the five of us inhabited two worlds where Bob Neals couldn't find us any fish but a perch today? Besides, what is a crescent without one's thinking of the moon? And the moon is a symbol of such lunacy as I have enjoyed while writing this post. Not to mention today's sustained inspiration on ice.

Here's the rub. Never value mythical heroes more than real people. That's my advice. And hard advice to follow. Just think of the droves of TV addicts who get more turned on by those inflated dramas than real life. I'm not one of them. That may seem ironic. Dante Alighieri must mean more to me than the best musky fisherman on Lake Hopatcong, since I'm a poet, right? I don't even know the modern-day Dante well. But I ask the question: What is more and less about this relation between past and present? The categories are different. And yet, here we see they're related just the same. One influences the other. I don't take a side: that Dante, instead of this one. Today I let them be together.

Most of the time I don't fall through the ice.

Homer in Black. Jason on the left.

Homer and Tracy

Marty on the Bridge

Will Ice Fishing Last into March?

On Friday, we departed from the Newark terminal at 7:00 a.m. Perceptions the likes of which otherwise I pass on as significant, at the right time and place, they become lifelong memories. The way the sun appeared on the horizon, as the Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 backed out, impressed me as the very source of uplift, which around here, on Planet Earth, it is. And within minutes, the jet roared down the runway and took wing for Texas.

That Friday morning was the beginning of something here in New Jersey, which me and my family were happy to escape for a long weekend. Leaving Hobby Airport in Houston, we drove directly to Johnson Space Center. I chose to rent a little hatchback, since we wouldn't drive much, and the AAA discount saved us more money than my Outdoor Writers Association of America discount would have. It's a funny thing about writers. They get left out in the cold. Penniless or close to it, that is. Eighty Five degree warmth felt almost hot. We had shot southward just as the arctic air mass kissed our tail.

And here I am on Wednesday, unable to get out and fish yesterday, because torrents of rain came down in the morning, and I usually don't go out in such this time of year. In the afternoon I worked. But after missing out on the fantastic ice fishing earlier in the season, I felt happy to get a phone call from Landolfi, telling me to forget the rain and near 60 degrees, there's 12 inches of ice on Hopatcong. I doubt that much, but there's about seven.

Dead. That's the lake I know. Four of us in my purview altogether, each of us after northern pike, sunfish and a couple of crappies got caught jigging, but not a single flag rose to honor what we really wanted most.

The fishing a month ago or so impressed me as verging on insanity, it was so good, judging the faithful photographs in the reports, and especially the numbers, but the size: Out of sight. You had to be there, and I was so caught up in things, I missed the part I like best. First ice.

One of the guys is wondering if it's all over. Not the ice. He feels assured we have a solid season now, which could mean it lasts into March, who knows, but he's fished the lake for many years persistently and knows how it slumps. Nevertheless, there's pike to be caught, and since they have to eat, some will get pulled through. If ice remains.

Back in late December, with weather like April, some people seriously believed there may not be an ice season this year. Never judge things by the nonce. Always include a larger picture supported by evidence, because if you plan by what the moment seems to tell you, you get fooled in the next.

That's not why I missed out on the pike action, because I held a consistent opinion to the contrary of no ice this year. I can't think of any year when here in New Jersey no ice came at all. Maybe it was 2008 when we had a week of ice fishing, but that's not nothing. And perhaps one or two of my earlier blog posts from 2011 or 2012 aren't grounded in such statistics, if indeed I questioned whether we would have any ice, rather than a short season. You can read them and find out if you want, I'm taking a lazy approach to the question.

It's too easy to lose proper sensibility to the sky and imagine things like a winter without ice in New Jersey.    

Jerkbaits For Largemouth Bass

 

 

Jerkbait Triple Play

 

The Early Largemouth Game

 

 

          You can throw curves, but it’s better to be on base and take a cautious lead early in the spring. You can’t steal without stop and go. Bass seem yet in training, warming muscles to allow them to give chase once water temperatures move well into the 50’s. Until then, you’re more likely to score by practicing patience. Three general types of hard-bodied jerkbaits or minnow lures serve as proven pitches as soon as bass begin to nose into shallows, and they score on through the prespawn period: suspending, floating, and sinking.

          Suspending plugs like the Rapala Husky Jerk, Daiwa TD Minnow, Smithwick Rattlin’ Rogue, and Jackal Squad Minnow, among many other brands, draw all the rage, applause dimming over the floating and sinking types of plugs. In cold water, you can tantalize bass by barely moving the lure, seeming to mesmerize bass into doing the obvious—sucking the plug down. Particularly in clear water, bass get drawn from a distance, but even stained water may result in hits, because a bass’s lateral line sensory organ detects subtle motion from yards away.

          This said, don’t rule out a floating jerkbait like the Rebel Minnow. Popularity cannot and never will mean everything. Especially so, since the Rebel Minnow is an old standby with a longer reputation than any Husky Jerk. Since this simple example of a highly effective plastic lure that rests on the surface at an angle is under the stadium lights, watch that it can be twitched with rod tip lowered to raise the rear to the surface, as the tail falls back with a little slack.


          This is a method every bit as subtle as barely moving a suspending jerkbait. It’s worked for me in water as cold as 47 degrees. But only during late afternoons or evenings after a sunlit, mild day has water temperature increased to 47 degrees or slightly higher, when will bass respond by taking the lure at the sunken end, making a surface dimple as slight as a trout’s sipping a fly.

          Most of the shallow flats and shoreline action happens after water temperatures hit 50, when bass get stirred into striking out after forage fish, and erratic jerkbaits spur reactions. Sinking plugs like the Rapala Countdown, Yo-Zuri Crystal Minnow, and lipless varieties like the Old Faithful and Pesca do allow the option of fishing deeper, but you have to reel the plug at a fair clip or it loses depth. At minimal speed, you hang up on bottom. Nevertheless, even when water temperatures reach the 50’s, particularly the biggest bass may be staging at depths of six feet or more, and sinking plugs wobble along very effectively if not too much cover like residual weeds or timber is present, although fishing over the top reach of vegetation can break your rod—or shatter the bat, if you will—in low light with falling barometer. It just might take a big, bruising female to sock the plug hard enough, and the game isn't softball. 

          Impart action to that plug. A rod tip is not only there to set a hook or to just reel a lure back in a straight line. Fast action rods serve best, since the stiffness in the middle and lower sections gives you better power and control by letting the tip make the lure dance, the rest of the rod transmitting hand motion directly to the top. In turn, you can feel the lure’s action in your hand much better and enjoy a quick hookset.

          With warmer temperatures, crazy action is generally best with floating and suspending plugs. You can drive bass nuts jerking them around. Don’t throw them an easy pitch, get bass to swing wild, and they’ll swing again until they hit. Especially with increasing water temperature moving through the 50’s to around 60 on a warm day, bass may be powerfully motivated to feed, and a minnow lure behaving like wildly frantic forage attempting escape can result in jarring strikes.

          Why is this? No baitfish is so obvious as to behave like a wisecrack.

          A combination of two factors may be responsible. For one thing, bass become aware other bass swim nearby; each is competitive. Have you ever noticed—when fighting a bass—another attempt to steal the plug stuck in the hooked bass’s maw? I once landed a double header. When a jerkbait comes crazy, bass have no time to notice whether or not another is after it. They immediately react as if another might get it first.

          The second consideration is sheer aggression. A minnow plug is really far from an exact replica of a baitfish of any kind, although lures of all kinds especially resemble actions of forage to some degree far from perfect. Nonetheless, lures especially seem to trigger something like territorial aggression by which bass jolt into fierce desire to kill.

          For shallow water success, many companies make jerkbait floaters. Smithwick makes a floating Rogue, as well as the suspending version I’ve mentioned. Kevin VanDam won the 2005 Bassmaster Classic at Three Rivers, Pittsburgh, with this time-tested plug. Famous Rapalas feature balsa wood resulting in rapid, smooth pulsations and jerk responses unlike any other brand.

          It’s fun to experiment and develop preferences. I’ve used Rapalas for more than 40 years, and for a long time the #9 floater was my favorite lure. Lately I’ve appreciated the Rattlin’ Rogue because I can work it deeper, though without the instantaneous response to the rod tip as with the Rapala.

          Early spring is perhaps the best time of year to tempt a big female, not just because she’s full of eggs, but because she feeds a little more than she would with the same metabolic rate, as she would feed in the fall, so that those eggs grow before released.


Among lure choices you can employ April through May, jerkbaits can have you covered.

Shiners for Lake Trout, Why not Power Bait?

So I finally got out and fished Round Valley Reservoir, first driving up Route 31 to Paddlesports in Washington to buy kayak racks, finding it's closed Mondays. So I salvaged the drive by photographing Spruce Run at Glen Gardner. I later found my best shot ruined by the lens hood getting shifted out of place and vignetting two corners of the picture, but did not fail to notice the Glen Gardner Inn beyond the bank and across the street at an angle from where I shot. I will return to this scene.

At Round Valley, I found Mike Petrole fishing his favorite spot where he can sit in his car and read the newspaper. I had a couple of photos for him from last winter, and then told him I had to go buy shiners. He offered to give me half-a-dozen. I gratefully took four. Last week he caught a 24-inch laker off a nearby point, so I took his direction and fished that, as he drove off to do some banking. Just before he turned to leave, he said he's caught two lakers on Power Bait this year, and they say only stocked trout take the stuff.

While I waited, a rainbow got caught across the way, and after an hour or so, I felt uncomfortable in the chill. I went to my car and read. When I noticed my 11-foot noodle rod had shifted position, I ran at top speed over the rocks for about 75 yards, but careful not to twist an ankle. Most of the line had peeled off the spool, frightful, because another minute or two could have meant a lost rod and reel.

Line tight, I lifted, closed the bail, and set the hook--into nothing. Took forever to reel in the empty hook and sinker. First thing I felt was an intense desire to get back here and do this again, and then I felt the inevitable: Do this again and not screw up. And you know how that is. It gets to gnawing on you. I felt like a fool for having sat in my car. And that was a big shiner the fish took.

So, stay or go. I decided to fish another hour. I still had shiners on two other rods. Yup, all along I had foldout chairs in my trunk. So I got one of those, took my book and sat there, waiting. Instead of reading, I found sitting still and listening to water lapping very soothing.

Pretty soon I saw Dave DeLucca setting up to my right, called out and walked over to see him. He's caught more than a hundred this busy season, but says the trout have moved out further from the bank, no surprise. He caught a rainbow on Power Bait within three minutes and offered to let me bait up. He's setting the bait on a short leader, maybe 18 inches.

"Early in the season, they hit marshmallow & mealworms, and then they just stopped. I noticed guys getting them on Power Bait, so that's what I've used since."

By the time I got back from my car with my noodle rod, Dave had missed two more hits. We fished another half hour and no more happened. Rainbows travel in pods. And they often pass on shiners, but will take this orange stuff that disgusts me.

 This guy trolled very slowly with an electric.

Slab Crappies Big Baits: Top Techniques Jigs Plastics Shiners

 

 

South Winds Pack Early Season Slabs

 

Greet the season with positive feeling for early spring, and don’t discount little signs of more to come. Big crappies may convince you the vernal transition is here. Once ice is gone from ponds, lakes and reservoirs, the water is open to sudden temperature spikes brought on by March and April warm fronts. Crappies invade coves, timber flats and shorelines with residual weeds in numbers fitting of an army. Action can be so easily enjoyed that perhaps it makes sense to enlarge your offering and concentrate on big fish. Crappies longer than 17 inches and upwards of three pounds are possible in some places in New Jersey including Spruce Run and Manasquan reservoirs, lakes Hopatcong and Mercer. Other reservoirs and lakes across the nation may produce even larger fish. A 14-incher is a good one, but if you catch one this size, more may add to your fun. Large crappies move in pods of similar-sized fish, and although numbers won’t be as many as in schools of dinks, you may anticipate the slabs with a lot more interest than would motivate catching smaller.

 

 

Bulky Baits

 

 

You don’t need a heavy jighead, no more than an eighth ounce, and lead can be shaved to less than a sixteenth ounce while retaining a large hook for a big plastic or synthetic bait. Wide hook gaps are important to ensure hook sets. The additional width between hook shaft and point means more grab relative to the plastic body of the lure. Bulkier plastics, synthetic baits and live shiners may best interest larger crappies with mouths plenty voluminous to accommodate wide gap hooks and especially by using a lengthy rod, they cast further. The typical tiny crappie jig is not the conclusive choice, not for slabs. Synthetics like four-inch saltwater Gulp! Swimming Mullets, tube jigs, twister tail and paddle tail plastics just as lengthy all serve the purpose of slowing a jig’s descent through the water column.

 

Why is this important? Two reasons. The longer the lure is in view to fish yet moving slow in relatively cold water, the more time the crappie has to react. And secondly, on retrieve you can keep the bait swimming above bottom where crappies likely suspend. So have a pen knife handy to reduce lead weight.

 

I got interested in large shiners for crappies while fishing for northern pike. For pike, I like to set bobbers using a couple of rods while nearby live lining a large shiner with my favorite St. Croix. Most of the pike take the live-lined shiner presented on a size 6 plain shank hook through both lips, used with a barrel swivel to tie the leader and add little weight. I cover range bobber fishing can’t accomplish. One blustery, warm afternoon with wind blowing up from the south, I got into a bunch of big crappies on these large, live-lined shiners, a very convincing experience. They took the bait whole, and the fairly small size 6 hook was sufficient for hookset, otherwise allowing the shiners maximum liveliness. Don’t set the hook instantly when fishing shiners, but don’t wait more than five or six seconds, either. Avoid gut hooking.

 

 

Southerly Blows

 

 

While fishing lakes and reservoirs, not only the warmth rising from the south matters. Finding downwind coves or shorelines means the shallows are turbulent with water warmer than any coves less exposed to the sun, which positions on a more southerly axis this time of year. Turbulence itself provokes fish into further activity.

 

Crappies have lateral line sensory receptors which make them aware of commotion at the surface. Sunlight on the water goes through the chop and gets dispersed at crazy, random angles. This means a light show goes on underneath, and forage fish lose inhibition, since they sort of blend in with this disturbance, or are at least a little less likely to be spotted, or sensed by predator’s lateral line receptors, since so much noise is generated above. For comparison, imagine a perfectly calm surface with brilliant sun penetrating straight through. What forage fish will venture out in that, made visible in high definition? The sun-scoured aquatic environment is simply inactive compared to warming water in motion caused by south wind, which gets the entire food chain accelerating—at least for the afternoon and evening—into spring activity.

 

In some situations, waves crash against a muddy shoreline and discolor water, which gets pulled out and away from the bank for several yards or more. The edge of discolored water should always be fished carefully. Even if water is only two feet deep or so, crappies may be feeding especially on invertebrates such as aquatic worms. A worm-imitating paddletail like the four-inch Keitech Swimbait is a big offering that may trump the interest slabs have in smaller.

 

 

The Quantum Leap

 

 

A lake, reservoir or pond can be understood as quantities in relationship, and things can equate to action so fast in early spring the situation can seem to have the quality of magic. Lake Hopatcong is probably one of the best examples in the nation of a lake with many coves. It’s a very small lake compared to some, only 2680 acres, but perhaps the best of any to score high at pattern-seeing on the Rorschach test would fail to draw an analogy to anything else by the lake’s outline. No amoeba could ever roll out into so many shapes and diversions. River Styx is a huge cove, productive for perch and pickerel ice fishing all winter, but sort of suffers a lag after ice-out until water temperature spikes, and suddenly crappies leap from outside the weedline up into shallows of four or five feet, initiating the first stirrings of the pre-spawn period. Likewise, flooded timber shallows of Manasquan Reservoir would light up a computer screen, if any could scan acres just for crappies suddenly present and turned on. Whole ranges of many lakes and reservoirs come into play as entire populations of crappies take the leap from relatively inactive waiting, to critically needed feeding on baitfish among residual weeds to spur the growth of eggs for spawning by late April or so.

 

Ranges—untold acres—of residual vegetation may be full of spots to consider, although some reservoirs, like Spruce Run, have little weeds, submerged brush, docks or timber yet produce very large crappies. Since the acreage of a cove like River Styx is enough to be a small lake in itself, break the possibilities into manageable units. Fish docks or any submerged brush. Plenty of vegetation—sometimes too much even this early, perhaps—exists in combination with these structures. Manasquan Reservoir has, instead of megatons of vegetation, a daunting array of flooded timber. Get back in the relative shallows downwind, especially where you find shallow edges of timber in relation to deep water.

 

A lot of what the game is all about involves dropping the electric motor and covering water to find pods bunched in spots you discover while on the move. Casting bulky plastics on wide gap jigs is a fish-finding method, although some anglers prefer a bobber arrangement with shiners hooked near the dorsal fin, dropping the rig into tight spots and allowing a short wait before trying another configuration of stumps or patch of brush, getting in a rhythm, a work flow that produces. Ultimately, personal preference combined with a desire to experiment may win the day.

 

 

Taking it Slow but Ready to Game

 

 

Remember crappies are not as eager to give chase as bass or pike. They will on occasion strike jerkbaits, but this early in the season the fairly slow retrieves of bulky baits or shiners work better. Sometimes a crappie gets caught and no more come aboard. Was it an individual straggler, or did the pod move on and out of range? A good idea is to fan cast the areas near the catch site. Crappies in a pod cooperate by staying together, yet like all individual creatures, they game one against another. When a lure or shiner is presented within the sensory range of more than one predator, the likelihood is that all involved will be alerted to discriminate if they can give chase before any other does. This tension of interest within a pod as a whole increases the likelihood of getting a hit.

 

That’s something to consider further, this competitive nature. An evolutionary biologist might say any individual of a species behaves in ways that advance the species as a whole, but fish can seem like utter fools for lures and bait, and when reluctant, may yet be provoked into striking. Impart a little finesse to shoot a ripple of interest through a pod. Observe that tube plastics have squid-like tentacles, twister tails undulate in the water and paddle tails vibrate in a way similar to the muscles at the base of caudal fins. Put possibilities to advantage. Don’t simply retrieve these lures in a straight, steady line at the same speed. The likes of an all too regular retrieve does little to send a message to crappie’s senses, because forage fish aren’t zombies; they pulsate by impulses of fright and flight, and at the heart of these responses is life beyond the facts at the surface of things to which they react.

 

True enough, a plastic tube hardly looks like a minnow, but if you twitch it subtly, irregularly, giving it life, the action is something like evading forage. All you need to do is once strike a nerve in a big crappie and it will take. Quivering animation may get every crappie in sense range interested if they have any inclination to feed.

 

A Stony Brook Fish Story

The Bend

Yet another reflective story as winter seems to wind down now, ice-out perhaps coming very early and ponds, lakes and reservoirs remaining open hereafter. My best friend from my teens emailed me from California last night, and suggested I write a story around the four-pound smallmouth he caught in Stony Brook, Princeton Township, back when we were 15 and 16.

"Steve, you're dreamin'!" I replied. "It was two-and-a-half."

Something flashed through my mind when I read his request. Now it occurs to me the theme involves concrete essence, a most radical idea introduced by philosopher Aristotle about 2500 years ago in ancient Greece. All the more radical, when you consider his best friend was Plato. For Plato, essences or Forms were out of this world. But instead of agreeing with his mentor that the body is a prison, Aristotle seemed never to forget the enjoyment of his partying days, and pointed to ordinary things and creatures as important.

About that riotous youth he enjoyed, when he got it together after long, hard nights to mind business, peddling herbs brought in the money.

When I look at the photograph of my second-favorite Stony Brook spot, the Bend, it makes me want to be there, slate knocking under my feet, assuring me of life's value as I cast a mellow yellow Mr. Twister, a foot-long smallmouth hammering it.

Now imagine if I were Platonic, had died and escaped the "prison" to dwell among the Forms. According to Plato, you're supposed to behold the Forms when you're dead. Suppose I did something naughty and looked the other way, back down to earth, to see something "corrupted" like the photo I've included with this story. What if, for all the Platonic High, what if those weighty rocks, supposedly no good for their tendency to go downward, made me remember how good it is to be somewhere? Plato's eternal Forms aren't really in any place since they're not concrete.

I'd come straight back to earth and be reborn, if I had the choice. Maybe if you're a real stoner, you can deal with being so high it doesn't matter being nowhere, but I think the root word of the self-description would imply inescapable gravity.

My favorite Stony Brook spot is called the Eight Foot Hole. A number of us still call it that on rare occasion. A spring release at bottom is good for both bass and holdover trout. Sometime during the past decade, my nephew once caught four rainbows there in August, and it's where in 1977 Steve caught his two-and-an-eighth-pound smallmouth. Even I had embellished it, when I wrote Steve back.

A number of us camped in the woods streamside, and on a number of occasions. Fair bet kids don't anymore, and even back then there was never anyone else doing it, but no one ever troubled us. Steve caught his bass in the evening, and I had come prepared with a wire-mesh catch bag for just the event of a big one caught. We also caught some 10-inchers--back then legal size was nine inches--and put them in the bag, too, keeping them in the water overnight.

And then before dawn, we got up, fixed scrapple and eggs by a nice fire and hiked the mile to the Princeton Day School ponds...with the smallmouths that survived out of water the near-jogging pace, to be stocked in the lower pond. We know at least one lived, because I caught the big one a year later on a Hedden Plunker off the surface. We even loaded a section of water with rocks, hoping the bass would reproduce.

We had permission to fish the ponds. The school Headmaster sang in the Episcopal choirs I sang in. But stock them? Well, we were kids.

Who knows. Maybe both Aristotle and Plato are right. Maybe this earth gets "stocked" with naughty people from Nowhere.