New Things

Some of my new enthusiasm for spin fishing is due to the new rod I picked up for this trip. For about 15 years, I've been limping along with an inadequate, 6' 1-piece job which is suited only for a limited range of uses (i.e., jigging) and unwieldly to transport. It seemed like a good deal when I bought it (it was cheap, sturdy, and better than most of the other choices available where I was at the time), and I wasn't spin fishing much anyway, so I didn't worry much about its shortcomings. But last year I decided that if I was going to spin fish at all anymore, I might as well have a worthwhile rod. So Monday, while picking up some more flies at a store in Baldwin, I browsed through the spinning racks and found what looked like an ideal setup, a 7' medium duty two-piece job by St. Croix. Spent more than I probably should have, but my venture into fly rodding and rods with low three-figure price tags has spoiled me for the cheap stuff. You can catch fish just fine with the cheap stuff, but a quality rod will cast better, get your bait where you want it more reliably, and be more sensitive. A good rod isn't a substitute for experience and technique, but it will allow you to employ those assets more effectively, and possibly gain them more quickly.

As soon as I started casting Tuesday afternoon, I felt this rod might have been the best fishing investment I'd made in some time. Casting was a pleasure, and the action and extra length gave me the feeling I was working the water more thoroughly--or more intelligently--that I had before. I started to scheme about visits to other inland lakes to hunt bass and pike, and soon I saw a very good reason to sit out fall salmon season.
Maybe I need to break some other fishing habits. I think the trips I've taken with my dad have cultivated some bad ones. Over the years, we've had some good scores here and there, and subsequent trips seem to focus on reenacting those--fishing the same places with the same techniques and hoping for but almost never attaining the same results. It's like trying to step in the same river twice, though we managed not (or possibly refused) to recognize that. We took previous successes as excuses not to pay attention, not a good move in any activity, and maybe least of all in fishing. Not that I worried about that much. Warmwater fishing wasn't really my thing, and I knew--at least I believed--that I could catch plenty of fish once I was back on the trout streams I preferred. This kind of dissociation from the task at hand helped me to survive these trips if not to enjoy them. They often did feel like occasions to endure rather than enjoy, possibly because of the attitude I took.

Tuesday night, we were in one of those ruts. We were anchored off a rockpile jigging worms in about 15' of water. A few times in the past, this brought us good messes of large rock bass, a wonderful eating fish. Most times, including Tuesday night, it brought us a constant stream of tiny rock bass and bluegill, broken occasionally by appearances of the pernicious round goby. A basic law of fishing is that if you're catching a lot of little fish, it's probably not just a matter of time until you catch a big one. After unhooking what must have been my dozenth 4" rock bass, another maxim came to mind, one that happens to be the motto of my bishop and which I've heard him utter on every occasion when I've seen him: "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got." I wondered if he might be a fisherman as well as a fisher of men; fishermen are more likely than almost anyone else to see compact, empircal verfication of this motto. Taking Bishop Gibbs' advice to heart, I cut the worm hook off my line, tied on a swivel and a small spinnerbait, and cast that toward the rockpile. Got a heavy pull on my line after the third cast and soon had a 25" pike in the boat.

For the rest of the trip, I spent time looking for different ways to work these familar waters--that's partly what motivated our upriver trip on Wednesday. And what has kindled my interest in doing other kinds of fishing in the future. Not that I'm losing interest if fly fishing for trout--there are actually plenty of angles to that which I've left unworked . And I wonder what other blessings might come of plying hardware in warm, still waters.