Litton's Fishing Lines: Lake Hopatcong Hybrid Stripers and the Sunglasses Story

Eventful day on Lake Hopatcong. I haven't seen Joe Landolfi since November last year because we had no ice, but I can tell we will be fishing at least once a year for many to come. I remember the two outings last year as if they happened this fall.

Today we fished a hump out away from the shoreline, and I recognized Marty Roberts immediately, called over to him, and the fun began. He had just begun to nail small hybrids of about two to three pounds, battling them on a couple of ultra-light rods, each baited with a live herring on a simple hook and split shot rig. Anchored, he insisted on putting the bait directly down in 29 feet of water. No more, no less. Who could argue? He seemed to have a magic touch. Joe and I agreed it was uncanny; we both felt this. That depth wasn't exactly the breakline between flat bottom and the sharp rise to shore, but the graph alarm rang constantly like Christmas chimes. And constantly, Marty retrieved presents.

I had met Marty at Dick's Sporting Goods in Rockaway Township a year or so prior. I was looking for something, don't remember what. He dropped me a question about what I examined, and conversation ensued. He had read a blog just before coming there, on hybrid stripers at the lake. I told him the title of the post, just guessing.

His face lit up. Absolutely astonished, he said, "How did you know that?"

"I wrote it."

His eyes opened wide as silver dollars, "That's you!?"

Now Marty relaxed in his boat. "Bruce, fishing has a lot to do with attitude," he said. "It needs to be positive." He sat back, legs stretched over the port gunwale. I felt his leveling with me--right there and then--would be one of the best rewards of the day.

Joe and I caught a couple of hybrids, missed a couple of hits, and against Marty's advice, we prepared to move on for what Joe hoped would be six- to eight-pound fish.

"You should stay right here," Marty said.

I laughed and shrewdly pointed at restless Joe, "Marty, I'm obsessive enough to stay right here another five hours. Joe never knows where to begin." He's never patient enough to stay.

Joe's the veteran. He's been on Hopatcong for decades and for a time was a large presence on the lake. He still knows an astonishing number of people here.

Marty phoned later to report four- and five-pound hybrids coming over his gunwales, and we did return, this at the end of our five or more hours in total out on the lake, although by the time the 9.9-horsepower Mariner got us there, action had slowed.

Earlier along our haphazard way, we gave a point of land scant attention by vertical jigging, but we passed through another range of water by drifting herring, wind allowing us to pass horizontal to shore. Joe was absolutely determined to teach me how to drift bait. Wildly edgy by turns of success and misfortune in life, a talented cabinet maker who ran his own business, hiring employees and enjoying a net gain of a quarter million one year, and then losing everything but black depression, he's turned his life around time and again, a man who never loses his appreciation for living, devastating depressions never convincing him going on isn't worthwhile. He never gives up. That determination is what I like best about him. The liveliness resulting from it he always contributes to an outing, and his focus of concentration is a talent in more than one respect. It includes making sure he gets across to other people by finely detailed explanations. But I'm sometimes as stubbornly skeptical as any you may find about what he says. I couldn't buy his idea that hybrids on the bottom--and walleye--would swim up from 32-foot depth to a herring passing over 17 feet up. I still don't trade my feeling about that for his. It's dark down there. Could lateral lines sense a target from that distance, given that vibrations from surface chop send even more information downward for fish to pick up, washing out a little blip from a herring? I don't know. Maybe those lateral lines and those little fishy brains are advanced enough to tell the difference. Anyway, fish marked on the sonar at 15 feet as we passed over. Were they hybrids? Probably.

As far as I know, walleye at this time of year don't suspend, but I could be wrong. Maybe some of them do, but they seem in their element among rocks on bottom. But herring do suspend. So walleye may suspend among them; even with the lake turned over this isn't out of the question, just beyond presumptions I feel strongly about. It makes sense that herring would avoid schooling right down among rocks where walleye would typically lie, but walleye eat just about nothing but herring in Hopatcong, so maybe they do rise, even though oxygen in the depths this time of year allows them some suitable habitat, rather than open water. I don't know. But there is more to consider. Most of the rocks--schist for the most part, if I'm correct--situate shallower than 20 feet, by what I'm informed. It's not that more walleye are at bottom 20 feet or shallower this time of year, but that they don't have stone providing habitat for them in most of the deeper water, anyway.

So.....who knows.

But I catch a lot of walleye on bottom 35 feet deep or more. Whether rock or other cover is in those depths or not, walleye hug bottom.

That stubbornness I mentioned got the better of me as we continued to drift. I let my weighted rig down to bottom on the sly and got snagged. (A bottom bouncer rig supposedly avoids this, but I used an egg sinker.)

"I have to fail first before I learn anything," I said.

I retied, committed now to adjusting my way of fishing to the one Joe insisted on.

No one I know of has failed in life to the extent I have, proportionate to potential I have always known I possess. The relatively little I have complained about it has blown back at my face, so while I may lack positive attitude in some respects, to recall Marty's observation of me, the situation isn't petty; it's a life-long refusal to get altogether indoctrinated to going styles, educational or otherwise. I like to carefully turn the table on what is commonly perceived as the truth, by a truth I have originated. Often it solves a problem. But in the big picture, it still appears as if an awful lot of solutions have to add up to my getting ahead in the eyes of the world.

Besides, when I let too much weight to bottom, I'm set back.

We both lay back in the bottom of the boat to relax, Joe launching into one of his many fascinating stories from life. He told me half-a-dozen or so. Just before he began his best, the Sunglasses Story, I quipped that I was a little tired, and actually I was afraid the week's lack of virtually any sleep, busy at writing projects, was going to make me nuts if I didn't watch out. I drive about 1100 miles a week for my job, and while I don't complain about it--plenty to be proud of with writing efforts in addition to it--staying sane really is an issue, and while I never give in to helplessness, never let nerve fail, I do have to be careful sometimes. Have to think and act to balance what could be a lot of trouble. Thinking always gets me through to normal life again, even when it seems impossible.

Here's what it can be like in another way:

Joe dropped sunglasses into Lake Hopatcong. He swung the boat in their direction to try and retrieve them, but the water was rough and he couldn't see them as they must have suspended just under the surface. There's a reason I don't say they sank, and I will get to it. Joe's told me he can't write for beans, but he tells stories better than anyone I know. Hours in a boat after fishing years together can get interesting. A great Jewish prophet, who knew he didn't have to be a prophet to say so, said that all true living is in meeting. In other words, if you can't share stories, you're missing out in a dire way. Print doesn't offer a stage for gesture and expression, but it does allow deeper comprehension, if you will engage it, so here's the story. To lose Gucci sunglasses to a 2680-acre lake, then to catch them inadvertently the next year while trolling for muskies, alludes to another theme of age-old prophets--redemption. Something fouled the thrumming of the foot-long lure, the rod taking on a little bend, but not bouncing to the vibrant resistance of a fish, as if otherwise a perch or crappie got inadvertently snagged. Hopatcong's water mass flows, but very slowly. The sunglasses hadn't traveled very far in the direction of the Musconetcong River below the dam, but they neither floated nor sank to bottom. The plug--the lure--ran about 10 feet down, where the Gucci glasses suspended in-between surface and bottom like a fish. The event signifies how Joe manages to live by so many amazing falls and rises. Life comes back if you troll for it.

Getting those sunglasses back from a lake that big. Joe beat the odds.

On that first, long drift for those suspended hybrids I was skeptical about, we talked as a hybrid nailed my herring over about 30 feet of water. Joe's stories had revived me completely. I was no longer tired at all. Never felt pulled precipitously close to the edge, even though I could feel the possibility in me.

Hours earlier, we had taken one of Laurie Murphy's boats out from Dow's Boat Rentals. Reality makes all the difference to living a good life. Places off the screen. The nation still struggles to recover from recession. Upon return to Laurie's shop, I said to her, "The whole country's dead."

She said, "Business is down to about 10 percent of what it used to be."

It was no occasion to be a chump and speak any words of hope. "The issue, rather than money, is fundamental. People's motivation is lacking," I said. Not long ago, I visited a 50-acre woodland preserved by Green Acres funds. I found no trails. As a boy, I explored the woods thoroughly, as did other boys from the neighborhood, trails leading through. Now they follow pathways on screens.

I changed the subject and the three of us laughed about Joe's sunglasses, the story still vividly present in Laurie's mind, as Joe had come in that day of their return happy as a high-flying kite.

My story would end well on that note, but I must explain Joe's hybrid mounts, one of them now up on the wall of a local bar where Joe knows people. But Joe didn't know Marty. For once, I knew someone on Hopatcong Joe doesn't. Just before we parted company with my acquaintance, Joe said to him, "I have two hybrid mounts on Laurie's wall, an eight-pounder and a six or seven."

"Oh, yeah!" Marty said. "Laurie gave me a mounted hybrid from the shop!"

"Oh, no!" I said. "I bet Marty has your striper!" I was laughing all the harder because I sense social connections already there before people meet. And I felt confident Joe will be on the lake at least once more this fall, while I have only more outing ahead here this year, with my son.

It's confirmed. Marty has Joe's striper. Joe took the other mount off the wall of the shop, and placed it on the back seat of my Honda Civic. I never asked why, respecting instead his personal privacy, because the one thing I knew for certain--it's his fish, his mount. After more than a decade admired by countless of Laurie's customers, I soon discovered it will spend time at McKenna's Pub near the lake. Joe directed me to the place, a favorite of his. The mount may finally grace a wall of Joe's own, but just after I snapped a photo of him with the striper, he went in and placed it high over people at the bar.