July 11, 2023 – Chris, the Results Are In, and You Are the Father…. – Atlantic Ocean

Back at port shenanigans.

I have been lucky enough to be included in the Team Ward annual fluke fishing adventure during his vacation each year for many years now.  My son joined us for the first time last year, but because of snotty weather and also cold water outside, his first excursion was in the backbay and on a different boat with a different captain out of a different port.  We also did some backbay fishing with me as the captain earlier this summer, and he did great.  The true paternity test as it pertains to my proclivity to seasickness would come this week.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, it appears he is my son—his mom is also averse to long car rides and trains and boats if I recall.  Knowing what it feels like to be in that holding pattern between losing your breakfast and just existing in a weird purgatory, unable to fish or move but not heaving over the rails, I felt terrible for the kid!  He made it for about three hours of an 8-hour trip without feeling bad, and he did catch a couple fish, but the best part of his day was surely stepping foot on the dock at 2:30 PM.

Bubba's lucky shirt.  The boy somewhat alive?

I prepped him with some Dramamine, which probably explains why he never heaved, but he still felt out of sorts in the rough conditions.  It was supposed to be a calm day.  Captain Adam of the Adam Bomb out of Cape May brought up how NOAA was even sticking to their original forecast as we, and other captains he was in contact with on the radio, were experiencing whitecaps and a steady 15-20 in real time.  Adam worked hard in these conditions, and he is one fishy captain, so we persisted through the sloppy stuff and caught quite a few fluke and sea bass.  Even with the complex slot limit factor, we got pretty close to a boat limit.  Uncle Bubba turned it on in the final hours and probably had the most keepers in the box.  Young Emma used to have the juice, but she is slipping as she approaches college freshman status—maybe she was hung over!?  She still did better than her brother, who ghosted us yet again (not his fault, but still, you know??).  Ward and I did our best to contribute to the box.  He caught some fish and broke a rod, which gave him a retail quest this week, and I landed a good 5+ pound fish along with many shorts.

A good haul and a few good ones in the mix.

Adam was backtrolling into the current all day to keep the drifts under control, and he kept bouncing around to his marks—many just little pieces of reef worth a few short drifts—until we found a couple hot ones covered up with shorts and eventually keepers.  We stayed inshore for the first time that I can remember.  Ward did not recall ever seeing land when we have fished with Adam in the past, but Adam was in contact with others out on the reefs all morning.  By all reports, it was a struggle out there and even snottier, so not worth the long run.  I am sure the boy was happy we had a much shorter ride back to the dock at quitting time.  I kept a few filets for my mom to fry up for me, but Team Ward earned their lion share, and they have a big old fish fry in Ocean City in the not too distant future.  Oh the irony, but I felt great all day.  I probably did not fish close to capacity because I was distracted by trying to take care of the boy, but otherwise I had a good time.  I see a future business opportunity in drone air drops off and on boats.  Come join us at this reef for an hour of fishing, and then fly on back to port before you pray at the rail!

NOAA's forecast was accurate for the harbor.

July 4, 2023 – Between Meringue and Tejano, a Little Peace and a Mixed Bag of Fishes – Wissahickon Creek

Quite the variety on a brief evening walk.

With the holiday landing on a Tuesday, I didn’t really make any big plans for the Fourth.  My wife is a vegetarian, anyway, so I did not even have to grill.  I was basically on standby to drive the boy where he needed to go.  After a lazy morning and afternoon mostly around the house, I decided to brave the mighty Wissy with a dry dropper for some panfish and maybe some bass around sunset.  I picked a spot out of convenience to my house and proximity to good bass water, not fully considering picnicking all that much.  I found easy parking at an access just over the border in the City where I have trout fished since I was 10, I bet, and more recently I have found that some smallmouth are hanging on due to remaining decent habitat.  The weather was looking iffy, so a few families were packing out their grills and chairs and lawn games, but a few were hanging in there.  I could hear the insistent Latin beats when I pulled into the spot, so I knew I would have a soundtrack to this wet wading excursion. 

Good spots for a swim?

I did a short hike across a meadow by the stables and made my first few casts with a stimulator and a sunken ant on the dropper.  It did not take long to encounter a big smiley Dominican dude and his kid in underpants cooling off in the crick!  Dude told me he had seen a big golden fish earlier in the day, and the kid got all excited when I landed the first couple of sunfish, but I did not want a half-naked audience, so I moved further downstream towards the next access point.  I did note that the golden fish was probably a trout, even though the water was close to 80 degrees by now.  I actually thought another party was going on with how loud the music seemed to be and how far the sound was carrying from the next parking lot.  As I fished my way down, I eventually realized it was just a couple blasting Tejano while they floated in rafts like it was their backyard pool.  A lot of noise for two people!  The fish didn’t seem to mind.  As the sun got lower, and I switched to a dropper dropper with a dry then a soft hackle and then a weenie hanging below, I picked up a bunch of panfish.  Rock bass, sunfish of a couple varieties, smallmouth bass, including one decent one about 10-11 inches, and even four surprise trout ate.  Two of them I caught targeting a pod of risers, and they took the soft hackle as the dry did a swing in front of them.  Like earlier this month in another county, some of these little fellas looked like they were TIC stocks.   Maybe they let them go near the end of the school year or something?  Or they might have been just the right size from the PFBC buckets to survive this long.  I did catch a real sized rainbow too.

They loved my weenie.

I knew it was weenie time of the year, and besides those risers, fish favored the weenie, especially when it landed under overhanging tree branches.  Even the bass ate the weenie, including the only one that was not panfish-sized.  It was starting to get dark, and I did not know if I had any water downstream of the raft crew, especially water that was not all muddied up now, so I hiked out by about 8:30, probably a bit before magic hour for that big stimmie to get eaten with more gusto.  With the humidity and the water so warm, it was hardly a way to cool off, but it was still a good little diversion under ten minutes from home.  This was not the year I thought I would encounter holdover trouts in the Wissahickon Creek in July either, but it’s been a strange year.  Up until recently, low water but rather cool daytime air temperatures, so maybe not all that surprising?

July 2, 2023 – I Can’t Decide If It Was a Good Morning or a Morning of Missed Opportunity or Maybe Both? - Northampton County Limestoner

Second-best opportunities would have to do.

Had I not grabbed my phone and furtively parted the curtains again for a second peek, I would have thought I was still dreaming.  You see, I was up before my 3 AM alarm, and the first thing I did was look out the window to check if it was raining—maybe I was secretly hoping to go back to sleep, but more on that later.  Anyway, at eye level no more than five feet beyond the glass was a buck with a big old rack looking right back at me.  Maybe he didn’t actually see me this first time, and he surely was not a dream, because I opened the curtain again after getting my phone to attempt a photo, and he was bent down chewing on our succulent hosta treats.  When I opened the curtain a third time after failing to get the camera working correctly in my grogginess, he was gone.  Arguably still groggy and way more swampy, I got a do over much later in the morning with a deer on the train tracks ahead of me, but she was more like fifty feet away and was certainly not a trophy buck.  I also landed a great, beautiful small stream fish today, but I had a knot fail (my own fault, as I was physically not all there this morning) after a prolonged and winnable battle with a far larger and angrier wild brown buck.  And so, a theme and a title for today….

Not quite "the one" but pretty good.

I had a couple streams on my list to investigate this morning, and based on all the stumbles and mistakes and miffs and treed bugs and bad knots, I am glad that I did not settle on the mighty Lehigh River, as I would have taken a swim today and lost fifty bucks in tungsten, for sure.  Instead, I stopped at a small stream on the drive north that has some limestone influence and took a piss while I soaked my stream thermometer for a good 5 minutes.  It came back 64 degrees, upstream of the piss, so my window would be short, but it was good enough that I could save myself more driving and avoid the possibility of getting soaked even farther from home.  I was suited up to wet wade by 5:30 AM, and I am sure I landed at least 8 trout before 6:30 AM—the problem is they were all holdover rainbows and smallsies to boot!  I switched up bugs a couple times because no hatches were showing.  Instead of a caddis offering or two, I put a frenchie on the point in case mayflies were still on the menu each evening, and I put a tiny perdigon on the dropper in case it would take midges to fool a wild one or two.  It did, although a few took the french pt in deeper riffles.

A lot of smalls in the wee hours.  Plenty of cool-ish flow.

That changed worked, although the first five or six wild browns were also smallsies in their own right.  I took another water temperature around 7:30 AM too, just in case, because I could not find an adult fish that wasn’t a rainbow.  Some of them were really pretty and might have even been stocked by a Trout in the Classroom program, but I was not ready to lower my expectations just yet.  The water temperature was still fine, though inching up already, so I knew 9 AM would be quitting time unless I found a spring on my walk.  I was sticky and tired and not all that coordinated, as I mentioned above.  I had that feeling when I got up, but I ate something at 4 AM and packed more food and coffee, knowing that would work to prolong things.  It did keep me going, and I did catch a mess of fish, but I was not on even my B- game today.  Had I been, I would have not only had a photo or two of a great 14+-inch fish from a small creek, but I also may have had a selfish shot with a true small stream piggy.  Don’t get me wrong, this first nice fish I did land was a blast!  Hanging in bouncy rainbow water, jumping three times after hooked, but I wish I had been half as efficient in sticking the landing with my next big fish routine.

Bug changes and browns came.

When I have fished this creek in the past, I have remarked to myself that there are two holes along this stretch that are “big fish holes.”  I have been shocked that I have not even spooked or turned or messed with one in the handful of times, maybe more, that I have fished this particular stretch.  Earlier this year, I pulled nothing but rainbows out of both of these holes, but today it was all browns, so at least my hunch was right—the residents had probably tolerated the bows for only so long.  As I snuck up into position today, careful in my current state to map out in my head all the overhanging limbs above and rocks, logs, and more industrial debris below in the water, I stuck a huge fish on the perdigon dropper tag.  He (or she) was angry!  I could feel those violent head shakes before I could see them in the deep, broken, and still somewhat stained water, and just knew it was a wild brown.  The fish tried to go up into the next hole twice, and I got him back down, and then he started digging for all the debris in the hole—there is metal and wood and cement and you name it, plus a bunch of branches hanging over the water, so basically a good place for a big fish to live, but not a good place to try and land one.  I had him about ten feet in front of me twice, so I got to witness this big old fish, mouth wide open, trying to shake the bug out of his face and/or the rod out of my hand.  Angry, yo!

An especially pretty one

I had to put pressure on him a few times.  If I let him take over the fight in a creek this small and full of obstacles, I would surely lose this one.  Hah.  He was not fighting recklessly but instead intentionally going toward every place in the hole I did not want him to go—typical seasoned wild brown behavior.  When he popped off not 5 feet from my net, I was pissed!  I was like, I know I had to put the boots to him a little to end this sooner than later, but I did not use THAT much pressure, especially on 5X and 10 feet of a 3-weight rod cushioning him!  Was I going to fight a big fish in 66-degree water for 20 friggin minutes!  I did not throw the rod, partly out of self-control and partly because I had a new reel only two trips old, but I definitely was that guy cursing out loud by himself on the crick.  It was my own damn fault too.  

Rather pretty but industrial so a lot of stuff in the water.

The size 18 competition hook held tight, might still be deep in his kyped jaw, my dropper tag triple surgeon’s knot did not fail; instead, it was a damn blood knot I lazily tied after two previous snags in a row.  In lazy lieu of starting over with a fresh 4 or 5 feet, I added length to my tippet like a mitch not expecting big things to happen on a small crick (even though they already had not 20 minutes earlier!).  Instead of a big old fish, I had 3 feet of 5X with a squiggle where the business end of my rig was once (poorly) tied.  So you tell me:  Was a it a good day or a bad one???  I am going to go with good, but it was definitely complicated.

More bows to end, and I placed the rod on the ground, I did not toss it, I swear.