Lake Hopatcong Trolled Hybrid Stripers

Funny how I feel entitled to experience as I imagine it coming. On the way up to the lake, I was in an annoyed, irritated mood, keeping it from my son, but thinking he could sense it plenty, irritated because I didn't get to bed until 4:00 a.m., and didn't wake until 10, the hour I had planned for us to hit the road, and even that plan somewhat of a compromise on my original dream of us having all day after Matt's freshman year at Boston University, though we would still get in eight hours. I have memories of us fishing during summer for eight, nine hours, when we forgot everything else and slowed way down on the lake, comfortable in 90-degree temps, sun on the forehead. Today would be a day just like that.

Well, for one thing, the fish wouldn't leave us alone. Besides that, yes, it was raining, very hard, and the temperature never got out of the low sixties. Soaked almost through and through, despite rain gear that is supposed to work, I was not only shivering by the end of almost five hours, I shook. Matt shivered.

I forgot my apprehensions while driving up, but while catching the first two or three hybrids, I felt too much my supermarket salesman self, as if that forehead of mine so worthy of solar heat was still fixed on the relatively monotonic process of moving product. Not that this is any complaint; I think I've got beyond unease and have embraced my job fully, but the natural world out there, that's a much larger reality than any sort of architectural structure, such as a supermarket that stands on given earth. A reality much bigger than all that is done behind any walls.

So greater dignity is appropriate outdoors.

Over the course of nearly five hours and 10 of these hybrid striped bass--the largest at five pounds, 15 ounces; Matt's biggest five pounds, 9 ounces, most of these fish fighting as if we hooked freighters on the Atlantic, all of them on various trolled plugs--we got well beyond where we came from, thus fulfilling some of that "all day" feeling, though we never sought out Woodport, a range of the lake we haven't fished, not even the Byram Bay area where we like to fish in the spring. I became aware of how the driving rain and chill affected me, but not with the observational clarity I tried to focus, so I just accepted that was no use, although I wasn't dysfunctional, just a little too short on patience for the first couple of hours.

And yet, it had happened. Ever since my son and I caught a number of nice hybrids on an October excursion in 2014, my biggest over five pounds, I've dearly wanted him to catch one at least as large. That trip nearly four years ago seems like yesterday, and yet the deep longing for my son's nice one has endured deeper than we can measure time. I wasn't in anything like an euphoric mood today, or even a relaxed state, but complacency doesn't describe it, either, so I give myself a pass; even though I wish I could have better celebrated the catch, there's time yet for this.

I remember not one, but a number of fishing excursions during my teens in steady rain, on one occasion getting to my destination eight miles distant on my bicycle, and then hiking a half mile or so, not a path, but through the water of the stream dammed at the pond I fished, air temperature at 50 degrees. Was this insanity? No. Unusual stubbornness, yes. I didn't know this then, but by the time I got home on my ten speed--after dark--I was in second-stage hypothermia. All I knew, I was delirious. Very.

So today I tried to compare, not very successfully, my ability during my teens and 20's to deal with weather extremes, compared to me now at age 57. I did conclude that it's harder to do at this age.

A great day. Even when I doubt, as I doubted today on the way to the lake not about the rain, but about the amount of time we might have and our opportunity to go deep into experience, we always seem to come through by getting out of the grind of the ordinary. And it didn't take a high mood for me to do this. We didn't fish until sunset, but going on five hours was fully plenty.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2012/05/lake-hopatcongs-enhanced-fishery-is.html

To the WH

Lenny, who knows, maybe there'll be another nut on the premises soon. He does drive a stick. If those trees in front of you were clear cut, you could see the farce. Not talking down to you. lol. Some words just don't work outright. You're in the real WH, my friend. And I bet that place over there will never have tigers in the other river.

Hoping for Hybrids

Not surprising Laurie's report shows a break in the panfish pattern. We suddenly got jumped by warm spring weather, and I hope the big hybrids, who knows, maybe a walleye this year trolling, remain willing to hit when I get out with my son in the middle of the month and Jim Stabile at the end. Any event, fish of various sorts will get caught.

(Remind me to pick up a jointed Bomber at Laurie's shop.)

The Knee Deep Club’s walleye contest was held this past weekend, with 44 entries and some tough fishing for starters. But fishing picked up in the evening  and overnight, with Tom Sarnacki catching the 1st place fish weighing 5 lb 7 oz, Eddie Mackin placing 2nd with a 5 lb 6 oz walleye and Mike Rastiello with a 5 lb 4 oz fish to finish in 3rd. Joe Orlando trolled with a jointed bomber in The Great Cove section of the lake, Nolans Point, to see his first walleye weighing in at 6 lb 3 oz.The weekend also produced some Hybrids being taken in shallower water trolling jointed Rapalas or bombers, with an 8 pounder caught by Dick Pedati, and 8 lb 1 oz Hybrid caught by Eddie Mackin and an 8 lb 2 oz fish caught by Jack Dziduch.  John O’Neill trolled his Hybrids on a bomber , also in Great Cove, his larger fish up to 6 pounds or so. Lots of yellow perch were found in shallower water also, hitting small herring or little jigs, and Mike Truglio was happy with his limit of nice crappie, the larger ones just under the 2 pound range. Several nice Largemouths were caught up in the Woodport section of the Lake, but released due to the closed season. Have a good week ...

Cold Front puts the Bass Off

Six days ago, while fishing this pond, the trees were brown and leafless, but the weather was sultry and summerlike. When I took my lunch at work today, I looked overhead and judged fishing would be tough this evening. Cloudless sky. Cold front, even though the temperature might have been 70. I came back here to Round Valley Pond with my wife and our Labrador, and before I started fishing the far corner with too much low-angled sun on it, remembered last time how sensitively my fish sense had directed me to the action...when I was more on to prey just as were the bass.

Today, forget it. An ordinary man. An ordinary evening. But it was nice, especially at the end of our stay for me, because I finally sank into the concentrated pleasure of working a Senko slowly, back in that far corner a second time, after I had told my wife we would leave in five minutes, she complaining about the chill, so I couldn't stay as long as I might have, had I been alone. I let that go without any tugging complaint, because you have to strike a deal.

I did catch a little bass less than nine inches in that far corner before we walked out. In the close corner, I missed a strike from another small fish, and then missed a solid bump from another little one immediately after I caught the bass.

You see the calm in the photo. Lots of hatching mayflies led a lot of little forage fish to the surface, some of them sunnies. Not sure otherwise. But when I see sunfish active like this, I tend to deduce from experience that bass aren't. Back when I fished Mount Hope pond a lot, when sunfish played with the worm, the general rule meant bass didn't. No sunfish touched my Senko today, but they sure slurped bugs.

I guess the bass had their heads stuck in the sudden mass of shallow weeds. (That not there less than a week ago.) Or went deep. I fished the Senko a lot as deep as 15 feet.

I must have seen a hundred forage dimple the surface. Clear targets from below in that changing light that advantages bass to see what they can eat. But not a one in all that pond was willing. Not a single bass broke water.


http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2011/05/round-valley-of-sun.html

Bass Encounters: What Psychotherapists Get Taught Doesn't Do

Got off the phone with Mike Maxwell a little while ago, who fished the North Branch at AT&T, while I fished Round Valley Reservoir and Pond. He went with a 13-year-old from the neighborhood, interested in fishing, never having tried before. Today he learned how to cast a spinner, and how to catch a trout, too, since he nailed one. This afternoon was one of those days, Mike said, when the recently stocked bunch won't touch salmon eggs, but smack spinners. I've experienced the same and don't have an explanation. Maybe it has to do with warming water. I don't know, but it looks as if we have a new member of the clan.

Just about to leave for Round Valley when my wife pulled in from work, I said, "Do you want to come?"

"Sure."

So out of the blue, I was about to get in an outing with her.

As we got out of the car, I took a look over the reservoir beyond, and thought cold. Not very promising at all; despite temperatures in the 80's, I doubt the reservoir surface moved out of the 50's, but we would give my favorite corner a shot. We walked the dike as I told Trish we headed to the reservoir's best spot for bass from the shoreline. Knowing all the while my actions would not substantiate this claim. But like a good citizen of a psychotherapeutic and religious nation, I did not go into what I was sure about.

Had photography in mind, also, and for more than a half hour the light was just bad, diffused by thin clouds, but I soon surprised myself, getting some good shots I'm keeping for possible uses. As light got a little interesting, it illumined no dramatic effects as had here in the past.

Fished persistently a blue Senko-type worm, but that something in me seemed to know before I took the second cast that it was useless to try for any fish, other than to relax, putter, look for photo shots. The first cast was about 10/90. Slim chance but only on the conscious theoretical level, I thought there might be a bass in close. I took that cast while I stood about 15 yards from water's edge, later asking my wife if she would like to see a couple of little ones where the worm had splashed down. Too little to take a Senko. That something which knew of no hope for fishing the reservoir isn't "I," who knows he does not know he won't catch any....and also prefers not to identify with his id. Of course, to be honest, I know I do identify with it, but there is the distinction to make, just as I identify with any values I possess, but distinguish them from conscious ego; it's not that I just want to wiggle out of an uncomfortable dilemma I find myself in, with regards to my weather-prophet-like accuracy at predicting where fish might be, knowing something about where the ability comes from, and knowing something about the bias we as a nation tend to feel with regard to the psychological and religious issue, but of course I manage to survive because I don't abandon ego and become id, although it would be quite possible I do so, not by any ought, but by disregard of ought, a hint of how free I am, compared to people for whom insanity simply seems impossible.

After awhile, I said, "We'll fish the pond," as if she were fishing, too. "There might be a bass in each corner. The water is shallower (though as deep as nearly 40 feet) and darker, so it warms a lot faster." And I was thinking that today it warmed significantly, and yet I knew it hadn't warmed all that much. I got low to a pipe leading into the reservoir from the pond's overflow, and I felt how cool that water is. Enough to keep the air coming out of that pipe at about 56 degrees. But there's more to this digression. That pipe is about 75 feet long, partly just like an open air cave, so it wasn't all about the water--easily in the low 60's at the surface--cooling that air. The underground chills. Constantly at about 56 degrees. I guess, but don't really know, even only some 20 feet under that dike.

My first cast yielded the sort of take immediately telegraphing the presence of a bass 18 inches or maybe two, three, four inches longer. "Got a big one Trish!" I slammed home that size 2 hook and the line popped. Bad knot. Broken on solid weight that felt just like a tree trunk.

I examined line's end for a sec and saw remains of my tie. So for certain, no big pickerel. I was all but certain it couldn't have been a pickerel with razor sharp teeth to cut line, certain by the way the fish moved slowly to my right, but I once caught a big pickerel on a Senko in Lake Musconetcong that moved off with it slowly and deliberately like a big bass. Mysteriously, I've never seen nor hooked a pickerel in this 30-acre (or thereabouts) pond while fishing open water, but while ice fishing the same pond, pickerel, and nice ones, are all we have caught, and in fairly plentiful numbers.

Against the better advice of my darkly demonic and insane unconscious mind (isn't this what they teach psychotherapists-to-be at colleges and universities?), I kept fishing that corner another 10 or 15 minutes, knowing all along--from that so-called delusional source I just mentioned--that nothing more would happen.

I packed it in, having first switched to a gray Gary Yamamoto Senko my son had given me in a full package of them for a Christmas gift, switching out to gray from blue without having taken the time I needed, time during those excited and self-damning moments after having lost perhaps the biggest bass of my lifetime, time needed, I say once again, to insert a protective O-ring over that worm like a little condom. I felt too excited. And of course, I was really foolish, though I didn't feel that way, already knowing better, from where none of us are supposed to trust, that fishing the additional 10 minutes or so with the gray Yamamoto would yield nothing. This is what fishing may teach me in the end: to know is not enough. I know that pithy statement after the colon is a crucial comment of Aristotle, or at least crucial enough to be Hampshire College's motto, the school in Amherst, Massachusetts, but it's a worth a lot more than service as a motto, and besides, I thought those words tonight as if purely my own. The Devil can never give you any knowledge. But it's as if he does know. And all you can do is sense that. At best you can assume knowing on faith, since, after all, it is an intuition. And I remember the religious stories, aware that the Devil is God's most brilliant angel in drag, an ugly drag as portrayed in Dante's Inferno, but in essence, not only is that what this angel wears, he is part and parcel of God, his Creator, which is not to say I will abandon my ego and become id, but that the least I can do is stop being paranoid, a bad habit I do seem to have lost years ago, and not only refuse to fear the reaper, but let go to the fact of the darkness within I fear like death itself, which is folly to fear, because inevitable.

Christmas is white. Not deliciously black as is the pond water right now.

"I told you there would be a bass in this corner," I said, "Now let's go try the other corner for one more."

Soon I hollered back to Trish, perched on the wooden rail above, "There is he is!" The bass weighed about two pounds. During the long struggle from the distance of a long cast, the Senko tore off, and I kicked myself for the loss, but what the hell, that made me think I need to buy a wider selection of colors, and holding the bass for my wife and the sudden appearance of a cadre of other admirers, felt nice. I put the bass back without bothering with my camera as dusk deepened.

I took the time now to insert an O-ring on the next gray Senko. I took more casts, working the Wacky rig with a lot of quick flutters, having noticed, while coming in, a couple of other bass fishermen trying between the corners, where you can fish a very long time for nothing, and yet the technique they displayed was theoretically right for the warm wind and water temperature on the cool side, the way they twitched jerkbaits. I later told my wife about this, telling her I "felt" (read: knew) differently and that I very stubbornly hug close to my hunches. "That worked," I told her. My Senkos, not jerkbaits. And as I continued fishing, I did not feel certain of nothing more possibly happening.

Finally, I decided I would get the camera out and shoot a photo of the corner with color in the background for possible magazine use. I took a very long Hail Mary cast way out into water at least 10 feet deep and set down my rod, then got the camera, selected an f/2.8 stop, got a good shot, put the camera away, and then picked up my rod and began reeling a little slack as if nothing had happened, which wasn't entirely my certainty. I began pumping in a good fish. "Nice one, Trish." Trish is typically quiet, just enjoyed the action unfolding before her, and in a minute or so, I held up a bass going on 17 inches. Unfortunately, after I got the Senko out of its gullet, I looked down there in what little available light allowed me to see, and could not even sight the eye of the hook, swallowed. But I don't use stainless hooks, so there's a good chance it will rust out and the fish live yet.

With line parted and reeled to the spool, I gathered my stuff, mounted the rocks back up to the trail over the dike and my wife, and proudly said to her, "Very few fishermen here can do what you just saw." No big deal, really, but it's a hell of lot better than psychotherapy.


http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2013/04/round-valley-bass-asthe-weather-warms.html

North Branch Raritan River AT&T Stretch with Salmon Eggs Microlight Spinning

 You can barely see riffles in the upper third of this wide angle shot. Not all the water is slow near the bridges.

Mike and Phil got here and left before I came, also fishing upstream, Mike later telling me they caught five, me figuring that in any case it's worth the time out, though other than having heard their report I came with blind expectations, not really prepared in the mental sense, though once I got underway, catching a trout underneath the upstream bridge in minutes, water moving moderately there, I began in solitude to work my way down into experience, winding down in a way that really mattered.

In the deep water upstream of the downstream bridge by 20 yards or so, I let the egg drift along the outside edge towards shallows a few times, then followed through on a prompt to work it closer to me, into the belly of that hole, feeling the tug, swinging back without a thought and playing another rainbow to my hand.

Downstream of that bridge, fast water. There's a nice seam and some relatively slow turbulence. I lifted a rainbow that got off on the second try, saw another turn on an egg soon after, lost yet another, and finally hooked up solidly a few paces further down, taking that fish for dinner along with the two previous. The fourth trout, even further down and hitting in full current, I intentionally let get off the hook after bringing it onto gravel, three enough for dinner between my wife and I.

I tried the upper bridge and slow water below thereafter, dreaming of a good-size trout like a rainbow I encountered in these stretches three years ago and very well remember, even though it was no more than 16 inches long. That memory brought me back home to this stretch and these runs as nothing else could have. Before this feeling came, I noticed the two cut stumps in the water immediately upstream of the downstream bridge, having viewed just yesterday a photograph I shot of them by wading out and standing behind them, how they have rotted out so much during the past three years as to have lost all that formal presence they had, letting that go and shooting sunset light on trees, though I'm keeping these photos that feature some interesting light.

And then I exercised my last casts, the darkness of water flowing a little high and though not murky, brown and blackish almost as if tannic during the fall, though it wasn't that but just the quality of its clarity hiding the bottom, yet perfectly clean enough to fish pale eggs.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2015/04/went-after-big-one.html 

Reversible

We just laugh. I never told Lenny, but where he's at, I pulled a reversal on Beethoven's refusal to play for the pigs, since there I figured the Old Man had entitlement issues.