Fishing

Fish Tales 2024/5

Fresh Water

I accidentally turned down the fishing aisle of a Walmart one Saturday last year and came face to face with a bright yellow telescoping spinning rod with reel and line included for $24. That's how it started. It would fit in a small backpack or in a pannier on my bike. It could catch fish for me along the Erie Canal, the Konkapot River, or the Housatonic, or almost anywhere else I could imagine. It could travel with me to Spain or to Santo Domingo and along all the byways and bike paths that I would explore along waterways that held fishes. It could bring unknown fishes up to me to be known.

That night I bled my eyes blind watching YouTube "How to Fish" videos and slept with little plan.

Sunday morning, coffee and laptop, I reckoned a bike route along a local reservoir that might harbor fish. At the last moment I thought "License?", looked it up and downloaded one to my phone on impulse for $50. Lucky for me because 2 hours later a Game Warden, against all odds, carded me, and with my first perch in hand I was found legal to fish and to keep 'em.

My father had often dragged me, a reluctant youth, out fishing along local streams on the golf course abutting our house and on borrowed rowboats on Lake Buel but to little avail. I learned to row, to piss overboard and to bait hooks with dug night crawlers but little else. We caught no fish to my memory. That first small perch I caught, hooked jerking and tugging and leaping with life and hope to stay in its own waters was a connection to life and survival I had never felt.

All the local waters were known to me from family outings as a child, places to drink beer and bring girls to, shores on which to meditate, eat sandwiches, and as general escapes. But now, with rod and lures and baits, a new world opened and I now hunted fishes. Trout hid invisibly in streams where I had skinny dipped and I never knew. Bass lunged at my lures sounding to the bottom and wound the line around pond weeds trying to anchor themselves in safety and pickerel leapt and slashed in mid air to cut my leader with their gill plates and bite my hand that tried to land them. A giant pike along the shore of the Housatonic followed my lure to within 6 feet from where I was standing on the shore, bumped it with its snout, shrugged and then slipped away, a lithe submarine.

I crept up to the edge of the Konkapot and saw a likely bolt hole in a nestle of rocks underwater and flipped a flimsy plastic lure into it. Explosion of water and a 21" Brown Trout lay heaving at my feet. I released it and wished I kept it. A metaphor for my many loves lost. They tell me a trout that size from that brook is trophy size, not the only trophy I have lost. To this day wish I kept it.

Upstream on the Konkapot, right in Mill River, is a pool that, that summer was landlocked from drought. Sighted lots of fish and one lunker, a rainbow I believe. One day, quietly on the bank, with a comfortable place to sit, I tossed in no fewer than 6 different baits over a period of 5 hours, right in front of the fish who surveyed and dismissed them all. It never dove for cover, would circle high in the pool then wander off into the shadows of the boulders below. Next bait same thing. This went on all summer from cool mornings to warm afternoons to cool evenings. Maybe the trout will still be there next summer.

I bought a Tenkara fly fishing rod, short tricky and stealthy with a fixed line and no reel, and found a spot on Seekonk Brook where I could cast it without too many snags. I climbed over the bridge down onto the riprap boulders, waited still and silent and stealthy for a while, and, on my first cast, snagged in an alder. I reached out over the stream to grab my line and scared a huge brookie up out of nowhere and he startled me just as bad, him slamming off the banks and kicking up rooster tails of sand from the bottom trying to get out of that pool. I went back to that bridge 20 times, and saw him often but he never looked at my offerings, neither fly nor night crawler.

Hubbard Brook, nearly nameless on maps, leaks out of the golf course in Egremont and oozes its way through swamps to the Housatonic River in Sheffield. My school bus route, 60 years ago, crossed it many times but now, as an adult on a bicycle, with my yellow Walmart fishing rod tucked into a pannier, I stopped on the bridge, more of a culvert really, near the town line. My elbows on the concrete rail, my back to traffic, fewer than 4 cars/hour pass, I flipped a rubber flat worm into the barely moving water with no hope other than to kill time. I knew kids who used to fish there 40 years ago but no kid on a bike had stopped here since then. Bang 14" Brookie and it came home with me and I grilled it on the tailgate of my truck in the driveway on an Esbit fuel stove and it was great.

Borrowed a kayak and put it on Gilligan's Pond. Small pond to drive past fed by Hubbard Brook and dammed on the lower end but long if you paddle upstream. You can bring a 4 year old with a bent pin and catch bluegill under the spillway below the dam, guaranteed, anytime. Rocks covered with heron shit, sure sign of fish. And there are bass.

I used to log with Bill Markham from Brush Hill and he was historic. Huge boned, broad red face and deep hoarse liquor voice-- "Whikey keep you young, Danny," he used to tell me. He had won longest dick contests at logger conventions when he was younger, I was told, and have no reason to doubt it. I watched him dance down the length of a felled red pine, limbing it with a chainsaw as he went singing a song I can't repeat. On the ride home from logging each day we would drink 3 long island iced teas in a Winsted bar with Pete Cassidy. Bill would never drink beer from a can because once he found a mouse in one. Brush Hill. I looked it up this summer, when I started fishing, and learned there is a pond at the dead end of that road-- 3 Mile Pond. I wasn't thinking of Bill when I wended my way up Brush Hill with kayak on truck, thinking of bass fishing, but when the road turned to ledgy ruts and I was easing the tires over the washboard I happened to see a sign "Brush Hill Cemetery" and stopped to have a look. Ancient broken cemetery and I recognized a few names, but, gazing out over and above the snapped, corroded headstones I noticed a few more in an unfenced meadow above. Low and behold, Bill Markham and his wife buried there with an engraved fieldstone marker and a beautiful view. Wife was the only one of his wives who could tolerate the whole Bill, if you know what I mean. So Bill told me. No reason to disbelieve it.

It is the next Summer now, and the fish I was seeing in Seekonk Brook last year are hard to find and the ones in the Green River on Rowe road come and go. The drought became official in mid September and the water was clear and low. One afternoon, almost by surprise around 3PM I caught 2 brookies and a rainbow trout in the same spot and saw a few others. A week later, without rain, more could be seen but would swim off but slowly when they spotted me with few nibbles. A few days later I suspected they might be penned in the pool because there were more of them and they disappeared like darts when they saw me with only the smallest ones testing lures that wouldn't fit in their mouths. To my surprise the next day there were dozens of trout of all sizes in the pool moving calmly from sunlit bare gravel to branchy cover. None were interested in my lures and I tried many. Eventually a risky cast hung a lure up on a fallen ash branch and, when I broke the line off I left 10 feet of leader (forever plastic) dangling in the water. I came back a few hours later with a hand saw, crawled and crabwalked over the fallen logs in the river until I could reach the base of the branch, saw it off and drag it back to shore and remove the wasted tackle. When I was walking back to the road the landowner of the posted property happened to show up walking his dogs. I figured I'd be arrested for trespassing and damaging timber again. "You fishing with that?" he said when he saw the crosscut saw in my hand. His name is Eric and we parted friends.

Saw a motionless big trout in the same pool, small trout and creek chub swimming all around it, and tossed a bait over its head, nothing, drew one across its bow, nothing. Finally dragged a split shot right over him and the instant it touched it him he shot off into the next pool. Do they sleep?

I reconnoitered  downstream and it's for sure, they can't travel that way. The river spreads out and leaks through thin gravel with no exit for trout until it reaches the next narrow. I believe they could jump the small twig dam upstream, but why travel upstream in drought? There would be no more water than here. 

This morning I returned with half thawed squid bait strips and cut them up into bite size morsels with braid scissors. I have tried baiting hooks with squid here in freshwater, both in lakes and streams, but with no luck. There was no reaction at first this morning either when I broadcast the scraps into the slow current, but when the first big rainbow took the first bit, fishes of all sizes circled in-- rainbows, browns and creek chubs, and maybe others I couldn't identify.

 I returned in the evening with more minced squid and startled a heron off a downstream sandbar and was glad. More squid for my trout and the heron be damned. Stealthy freeloaders. Kingfishers flew up and downstream chattering, waiting for their due. Fish are food for many, and I, too, will return tomorrow to try to trick a rainbow onto my hook with a wooly bugger or a shiny spinner or a royal coachman, but it won't be with a piece of squid. That used to be the difference between us and the baser animals.

Spotted a dead fish from the same Rowe Rd bridge and scrambled down the bank to check it out. Turned out to be a Brookie with its head wedged hard into an underwater crevice between two rocks. Hard to pry it out with a stick. No idea how it happened. Frantic, hard dodge evading a king fisher? Wasn't eaten or scavenged or scarred that I could see.

The drought worsened. I walked farther downstream than before and after only thirty yards the river dried up completely and I saw no standing water, not a pool or a puddle for a half mile until I reached the bridge on Boice Rd. There were some little fish in  the first tiny, stagnant pool I came to and  I gave them the last of my minced squid.

I helped a friend of mine clean out his dead brother's house and he gave me an 1950's pair of Burton 7x18 binoculars. They focus sharply down to about 3 meters so I took to scanning the steam bed when the light was right and the reflections weren't too bad and I saw some fish that I never would have spotted with my naked eye. Brookies getting ready to spawn, lying near their redds and defending them from creek chubs and small  Fall Fish. I saw one Brookie nestled between some rocks off the up stream side of the bridge that I wasn't sure was a fish so I tossed small stones at it for ten minutes to try to spook it and finally decided it was a dead piece of wood. I went back the next day to be sure and stared at it for a long time through the Burton's and it startled me when it suddenly swam away and into a bolt hole nearby. Felt bad about pestering her with gravel the day before.

One afternoon the light was perfect for watching bluegills in Gilligan Pond Spillway. There were at least 50 suspended still in the water facing upstream. I startled a heron off the dam and when it squawked those bluegill vanished instantly into bolt holes leaving 50 sets of ripples like they had no green cards and someone had yelled "ICE!". How did they know it was a heron? How did they associate the squawk with the predator? 

Salt water

After bicycling past many people fishing on canals and rivers and lakes in New England and NY State I now bike the coast of Santo Domingo along the Malecón to the west of the Río Ozama and Avenida España to the east and there are people fishing and spots to fish from.

I bought a telescoping marine spinning rod and reel from the cheap Chinese website Temu for about $30, scout likely places to fish from, see a few fish caught and get some advice. I begin by using artificial lures because that is what I know but have no luck. One day a guy fishing near me caught a small moray eel and gave it to me to use as cut bait. I now buy frozen whole squid from a supermarket and have better luck. Nothing likes a moray eel.

The Malecón of Santo Domingo stretches about 16 miles east/west bordered by sidewalks constantly under repair and ,on the south side, lies the Caribbean Ocean, which, I am told, is full of fish. I am also told it is only a sea, but, after fishing from a kayak on Gilligan's Pond and Lake Buel, it looks like an ocean to me.

My fresh water fishing experience involves stealth, hunting, moving, wading, thinking like a fish, looking under lily pads, around corners and eddies. The Caribbean Ocean is nothing like this. The shoreline here is mostly composed of very jagged eroded limestone cliffs from 5 to 20 meters (like 60 feet) tall. Some of the cliff is undercut, some is vertical but often it slopes steeply down to the surf, which makes retrieving a fish by dragging it up over the rocks very difficult. I choose spots that drop sheer down to the water, that have a place to sit and have a minimal chance of tripping near the edge. There are often PVC tubes cemented at an angle in the stone to use as rod holders. There is little shade.

Something heavy on the line, I peer over the jagged cliff, reeling, resting, reeling, can't see far enough over the cliff but as it comes into sight I see it is a moray eel more than 2 feet long. At first, as it clears the water and gets even heavier, it hangs straight down but then begins to spiral itself up around itself and up around the line and spins, wrapping the line around itself countless times, impossible to untangle. Depending on the species their slime coat can be toxic to human skin and their uncooked blood is poisonous. Their bite is not venomous but is strong and deep-- a trip to the ER for stitches and disinfection would be likely. I cut the line with scissors as I swing the thing out over the water and send it back. A local fisherman tells me that, once they are back in the water and buoyantly weightless again, they can untangle the line themselves. I don't know how he knows this.

A guy on a neighboring seaside cliff is fishing without a rod by twirling his line by hand in a circle over his head, like a lasso,  and flinging it out into the water. The line has a half dozen tiny hooks tied along it and has an 8d nail tied on the end for a weight. Some folks use spark plugs for sinkers. His hooks have no bait. He retrieves it with quick jerks of his hand, spooling the line around an empty plastic soda bottle. He says, "first thing is to try to snag some sardines then I have bait for fish."

There is a spot near the Punta Torrecilla lighthouse on the east side of the Rio Ozama where you can see needle fish in the water. One day, much like the day I spent in Mill River, I threw 6 different baits and lures right near them and, just like the trout in the Konkapot, they shrugged their shoulders and eased away. Later someone told me that needlefish have very small mouths and you should size your bait accordingly. Or go spearfishing.

Now it is October of 2025 and I am back in Santo Domingo. I arrived the first day of the relentless rain of Storm Melissa, no wind, but now it is the fourth day of constant rain, sometimes light drizzle and sometimes hard, but constant. Last year fishing here I caught only Moray eels, a puffer fish (even more toxic than morays) and one Lane Snapper too small to keep. This year I have a plan use a slip bobber to keep my bait up and away from the Morays. If I catch another one I am going to have to learn to fillet it, and I would rather not.