River Float Fishing Trips for Family Recreation and Awareness of Home

Float tripping the Delaware is a great way to go with family and friends. These photos of my son, Matt, wife, Patricia, and my son's uncle David, my brother from Connecticut, go back about seven years when the river was not so crowded near Barryville, New York. We rented from Cedar Rapids and usually still do. 

We drive up from Bedminster 90 miles, and David would drive down and across about the same mileage from West Hartford. My good friend Steve Slota introduced me and Matt (then five) along with his son, Tom (then three), to the Barryville region. Steve's been enjoying miles of the river between ridges for years before the New York Times discovered it. Never forget how wild this river is, no matter how many people are on it from all over. Even at Lamberville or Trenton, New Jersey, it's a wild river, not quite as clean, but not dirty. Smallmouth bass are plentiful in New York, and plenty are in Trenton above the tidal zone too. Walleyes are caught in both ranges, and tiger muskies in tidal regions as well as largemouth bass and sometimes stripers galore, which travel all the way into New York now too.

Rivers anywhere in the U.S. are a great American tradition because they are really more than traditional, us utilizing them recreationally, I mean. Same as anywhere else in the world, at any time in history, we use rivers because the planet is really home more than where we shack up. Since pre-civilized times--hundreds of thousands of years ago--we've floated rivers because the motion and centrality transports us about this open environment in which we live.