They're Out

Yeah. On two inches of ice, a 32-inch northern pike, and a 24-inch pickerel, from Budd Lake.

And I got word from my prime source, referencing interest on Ice Shanty. I got my news from NJ Fishing.com. http://www.njfishing.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101077

Pond and Cove Ice Maybe

There may be some ice fishing on ponds, North Jersey, this weekend. Some well-experienced guys might try some lake coves, though I don't want to be one to encourage that, and I think the sort who may do it don't need any. It will be interesting if I get any word about the likes. I always like to hear.

Noticed a pond mostly frozen over while driving home from work late this afternoon. Thin ice, but on the way to that three-inch mark, perhaps, before it will melt back, if the long-range forecast is correct.

Last late fall was like this. I got out ice fishing with Mike Maxwell on Budd Lake, five inches thick, on December 21st. After that, we never got out, and there was very little ice for anyone else. Whatever this winter brings, I plan on getting out a little. Ice or not.

New Jersey Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs is Central

New Jersey Federated Sportsmen's Clubs News Managing Editor, Oliver Shapiro, catches a Boston mackerel aboard the Last Lady II this past summer.

New Jersey Federated Sportsmen's Clubs News recently published, in November, an article of mine featuring popular New Jersey bass angler, Steve Vullo, who runs the Fishing with Attitude Facebook site. I had interviewed him and completed the story with point-by-point quotations, writing "It's Never too Late for Bass," not to be confused with a Litton's Lines post a couple of years ago or so with a similar title. I urge any of you who aren't New Jersey Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs members to join, if the $25.00 yearly fee isn't too much to invest. The News is published monthly, loaded with first rate 1200-word articles, a few shorter pieces, and regular columns. Every time I get my issue, read and view it, I feel transported, not so much to wild places in our state, but to a time and place embodied by the sportsman's dedication that spans many years past and future, embarked upon today. The News really transforms New Jersey, and yet this quality is not only really there for more people than me alone, it recalls the same spirit of participation I felt as a teenager, when I didn't know about the Fed. Back then I was fueled by Field and Stream and Outdoor Life magazines, and I assure you that if you read these classic publications, still going strong with no sign of stopping, you won't feel disappointed in the News. One of the regular columnists, Rick Methot, was an associate editor at Outdoor Life, and Milt Rosko, who seems to get published in every issue, has been published in Field and Stream. Here's the link: http://www.njsfsc.org/

I mustn't fail to also mention Vullo and I performed yet another interview. Expect to find "Steve Vullo on Big Prespawn Largemouths" in the February newsstand issue of The Fisherman. For such an "overbuilt" little state, New Jersey really is central as far as word gets out on fishing. The Fisherman, with its corporate office in Shirley, New York, began some 50 years ago as The New Jersey Fisherman, and then expanded to encompass the Mid-Atlantic.

My teens could have been described as a quiet rebellion, since I took fishing much more seriously than school or anything else, but I never thought of myself as that. I recognized the centrality of the outdoors to America. It was more like school rebelled against me.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2017/08/last-lady-ii-charter-beautiful-day.html

Fishing December

Now is that time after fall fishing action, when I wait with anticipation for some ice fishing. As far as I know, Dow's Boat Rentals have shut down rentals until March or April, but I've little doubt some guys still get out in their own boats to jig walleye. Now might be an interesting time for Atlantic salmon recently stocked--with plenty holdovers--in lakes Wawayanda, Aeroflex, and Tilcon. Of course, streams and rivers hosting wild, native, and fall-stocked trout get some attention this month, and if you want to catch any other New Jersey species--it is possible. I shouldn't fail to mention Round Valley Reservoir and the ongoing shorebound trout fishing, nor the Delaware and Raritan Canal as an option for pickerel fairly active in cold water. I used to catch pickerel in the canal at Lawrence Township through the winter on crappie jigs.

It's also the time to have mailed my camera in for repairs, since I just don't have much fishing on my radar until ice sets in, though, as I noted in the last post, I might fly fish. If I were willing to put up the effort, I could round up Mike Maxwell, the two of us loading my squareback onto my Honda Civic, and riding over to the Delaware River once again after last year's late November to try for walleye there. Action was so dead, I don't even want to think earnestly of asking Mike to join me on another attempt, but it is true: walleye will hit in the winter river. My brother Rick and I caught plenty during the seventies, floating my 12-foot StarCraft with an Evinrude 10-horse from the fifties. December.

Smallmouth bass will too. I've caught them wading the Delaware in December.

I actually like fishing this time of year. I just don't have the balls this particular year. Maybe fly fishing.

Round Valley Reservoir Structural Work Plan Disclosed

On November 14, 2017, New Jersey Water Supply Authority held the public information session I reported on in a previous post. The link below will take you to a pdf packed with the essential information presented for ease of understanding. There are diagrams that explain the project procedures, and much more in a full array of disclosure.

I still have a bucket of shiners on my porch, leftover from the South Branch Raritan River trips about a month ago with Mike Maxwell and then with Steve Slota. I've sort of hoped to get over to the reservoir, fish both these shiners and mealworms and marshmallows, but it's beginning to look as if I won't get over there until January, and if cold weather is severe, I'll use shiners exclusively, for lake trout.

Today, I mailed my Nikon D7100 to Nikon Service. The flash needs repair. I won't have a camera for at least three weeks, I suppose, but may do some fly fishing within a couple of weeks or so anyhow.



http://www.roundvalleyproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Round_valley-updated_presentation.pdf

Matt's First Big Shark

Night on Ocracoke 10 years after Matt's First

Matt’s First Big Shark

The 13-inch croaker I caught would serve as bait, cut into large chunks. Trish winced as I tried to ignite a lantern with wind blowing 20 knots, no use. Surf wasn’t heavy. Wind drove at our backs as we faced the waves. In darkness exposing stars we could almost reach and pluck from the sky, I heaved two fish finder rigs and piped the rods in sand spikes. One for our six year-old-son, Matt, one for me. We sat ready.

A long afternoon and evening on Ocracoke Island had ended, and we called it fair play to rely on a flashlight for this stint at night fishing, another beam from Lowes forgotten at the rental house. Having caught plenty of small pompano and cooking them in a pit for charcoal dug in the sand, Trish and I enjoyed a couple of microbrews bought at a specialty store in Ocracoke Village, all of this activity legal and feeling just as it should anywhere.

We sat in fold out chairs. Matt and I positioned right behind our rods. The cut bait soaked for several minutes before Matt’s rod lurched from the spike. He leapt from his chair, grabbed the rod above the reel before it could crab-walk to the suds, and slammed the butt into the sand with total determination. “Damn!” I shouted. Both of Matt’s hands near the gathering guide, he held the rod near his chest, its bend like a palm suffering Hurricane Andrew. Sixteen-pound test mono raced over his knuckles, drag squealing like laughter, but he was dead serious. Trish shot a look at me. Help him, you fool!

Matt gave me the rod. “It’s too big,”

“It’s your fish,” Our eyes met squarely as I took the rod and reel with light, gray-toned mono from Japan I prided, but now seemed too light to stop this fish. To insist my son put up the struggle would have felt absurd. If I could stop whatever kept plowing out to sea, we might beach a great redfish, I believed all too wishfully. That’s what I desired and imagined might be on the other end, but this was an August night, not November when great schools of drum frequent surf. I knew in my shaking bones I was fighting a shark—probably a sand shark, possibly a tiger, blacktip, or even a bull shark. All of these species represent reasons we get out of the water before the sun goes down. I tightened the drag just slightly, keeping stress on the fish by a strong curve of the rod. It stopped shortly before the arbor knot would break. I anticipated a very long heave-ho, beginning to pump the rod and gaining on the fish.

“Matt, you hardly sat down before you hooked it!” Trish said. She looked at me, and I could just make out her face. “Do you really think you’ll get it in?”

“I’m getting it in.” I gave her a haggling look, surprised no second long run had ensued, losing very little of the line I gained.

“What is it?” Matt said.

“A shark of some sort.”

“I hooked a shark!”

“Big one.”

I got the fish just outside the breakers and could not budge it any closer. After a minute of stalemate, it began heading north along the beach.

“I’ll follow it up the beach and holler when I need the flashlight,” I said.

“How are you going to get a shark out of the water?” Trish said.

“That’s what we’ll need the flashlight for.” I tried to sound fully convincing. There’s good reason for beach gaffs applied to the dorsal fin area, or a thick rope with a slip knot looping around a tail. But I was going to—very carefully—just try and figure this out. I could have nodded my head as if in false agreement with myself. Sure I will.

The bruiser heading to Hatteras, I steadily paced to keep up. A long while later at even longer distance, I watched the fading light of our flashlight. Sickly yellow. Low battery. I watched a few minutes later the light go out.

After brief silence, I made out the voice of my son screaming. “Dad! Dad!” For a few seconds, I felt a solemn moment between me and the great fish. Then I placed my thumb on the spool and let the line break. I turned and sprinted to my son and wife.

“You all right!?” I said.

Trish was laughing. “He thought the shark pulled you in.”


http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2017/02/outer-banks-inlets-fishing-march.html

Thoughts from a Short Walk

My family took a short Round Valley hike early this afternoon, taking a right-angle turn east at the end of the asphalt leading to the water from the camping launch area. That edge is just in the water now, whereas last fall, dry gravel and sand extended a number of yards to the water. Reservoir remains plenty low, but it will fill in four or five years. after the structural work on the dams is done, not that they're leaking, but out-of-date.

Matt and his Mom stayed close together on the walk, talking politics, while I took in the scenes, felt gravel under my boots, and exercised with my D7100 Nikon. They got way out ahead of me with Sadie the Black Labrador. Just as well, because I can't keep up with those two on the state of our nation. In terms of politics, that is. At least the current events reflected upon from various news sources.

What a difference since September. The last I walked this shoreline, I was in bad shape. Not overweight and weak in the musculature; my energies were wrecked and misdirected, though the themes my mind processed from those energies were consistent and interesting in a sort of horrifying way. It was brave of me to go there and fish, trying to catch bass after Fred Matero informed me of some then recent action, but I really wondered if it would take me years to recover from what I suffered. As events turned out, I was almost back to normal four days later, and three days after that day of recuperation off from work, I was firmly back to life without fear.

However Edgar Allan Poe really died, I can just imagine him getting his brain circuits crossed in ways that took him over the edge, never to return, but to the best of my knowledge, he wasn't an angler. We anglers always find a way.