When I awoke today and looked outside, it reminded me of those bad movies on the sci-fi channel. You know the ones where you can never tell wether it's day or night, just a general gloom hanging over everything. Not raining though it smelled like rain, humid and heavy with possible severe weather towards evening. So I did what any right thinking person would have done and took the day off to go wading a river fishing for smallmouth bass.
I packed a light raincoat and a water bottle in the huge pocket in the back of my fishing vest and was out the door in minutes. It's about a ten minute drive to the river and on the way I settled on the where to go. I pulled in a muddy pulloff just downstream of where a country road crosses the river. The bridge is old, very old with the abutments made out of stone instead of poured concrete. Under the bridge I paused to watch swallows go in and out of their nests in holes in the closest bridge abutment. From there they shot gracefully up and down the river looking like tiny fighter planes. The river has thrown a small rock bar upstream from the closest column and a small stream of water makes a right hand turn between the bar and the stone column carving out a chest deep hole surrounded on one side by a weed bed and the other by the mossy old stonework as it swirls around to connect with the mainstream in a deep eddy. I cast along the old stones a small spinner reeling slowly letting it sink just overtop the stone rubble of the bottom. There was a thump and a smallmouth cleared the water in a somersaulting leap. A nice start to the day.
Every good riffle it seemed held a few smallmouth and the weedbeds and eddies were full of willing pumpkinseeds and fiesty rock bass. If you have never seen a pumpkinseed its hard to describe, no saltwater fish even comes close to the wild and bright colors. It seems shocking really when all the other fish around here wear tastefull camo and this little warrior comes looking like a vegas showgirl. Wikipedia describes them thus..."The coloration includes orange, green, yellow, or blue speckles on an olive back, yellow sides and a yellow to orange belly and breast". In other words they don't know quite how to decribe them either, you just have to see one for yourself.
I fished about a mile and a half upstream scaring into flight a pair of wood ducks and four mallards. About halfway I could hear something or rather several somethings raising hell across the river. It didn't take long to spot the great blue heron rookery in the tops of some giant sycamores. They weren't there the last time i'd fished here, maybe two years ago and now there were a couple dozen of the giant stick nests in the tops of the big trees. The young herons were loud in the heavy still air as they called to mom and dad for more food. Just upstream a bittern flew out of a weed bed as i approached and I also got a glimpse of an eagle so it was a fine day to birdwatch as well as fish.
I ended up stopping in the nearest small town for lunch and fishing the river the whole day, a short but fierce storm hit about two hours before dark slowing the fishing a bit but by then i'd caught more than enough anyway. I'd watched carp and turtles in the shallows, watched smallmouth bass catapult into the sky when hooked, saw dozens of species of birds, looked at beaver and deer sign and had let a whole day just slide downriver in the current. It was a very good day to play hookie....
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