Litton's Fishing Lines: Mount Hope Pond Revisted

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Mount Hope Pond Revisted

Bass are hard to catch at Mount Hope Pond. They always have been. As my son and I set out along the western shore today, eventually working almost all the way into the back from the front of the pond near the swimming beach, this was the first time I've been up there at the 18-acre pond since 2014. I told Matt to expect two hits per hour on average, and today we went a little under par, but I am fully convinced the fish are there in completely comparable numbers to when I discovered this pond in 2011. We sighted about as many as used to be normal. I also told him that the few bass caught usually measure 16, 17, 18 inches, but the single fish I caught today was more like 13 inches, though I hooked another a lot bigger.

This fishing means getting back into the sticks. Not only that; it means getting stuck by them. It also calls on accurate pitching and casting. I physically showed Matt what this demands by parting brush, standing on a sloping and uneven bank from which I could have taken a dunk, and pitching the worm, never quite working out how I might set the hook, should a bass have taken it, and yet staying open to the thought. You do not want to break your rod on a branch, at least not if that rod is an expensive St. Croix like mine. Matt got the idea right away, went through the thick, sighted a bass he thought was five pounds, pitched, watched the bass vacuum his eight-inch Chompers worm into its maw and just as quickly force it back out.

I've seen only one bass that big here over the course of some two dozen or more visits, but I bet a six- or seven-pound fish exists that may never get caught. I've caught a couple that were probably over four pounds, fat 19 1/2-inchers, but don't get your hopes up if you're thinking of traveling I-80 and getting there. Mount Hope Pond is the best symbol I have of the sort of hope I live on, but it's tough, solitary, and with rewards infrequent yet a little outsized, it demands that hard effort to achieve, which most of us don't care for, but is dependable.

That's no slight against my friends. So many of you who read these accounts. I would be lost without you, and yet I go my own way. An angler always finds a way because he exercises his own judgment. That never means I don't confer with others'.

I doubt but very few others, however, catch bass here. Let alone any over five pounds. Who wants to get back into his car, scratched, and covered by mosquito bites, risking the infection of his comfortable vehicle by the dozen or so ticks crawling all over his clothes? It takes an unusual character to enjoy this kind of fishing. The sort used to nature's difficulty lifelong. The mosquitos bothered me little, a mysterious immunity that clearly seems to have to do with my habit of being out there among them, but when I finally took a good look at my son after hearing his complaints, my first thought was that maybe I had a medical emergency on my hands. His arms, his neck, were pocked all over by swollen welts, and yet he wanted to keep fishing. After the encounter with a true lunker. He knows how to judge size.

I blogged persistently about the fishing here. When especially the post I link to began racking up big visitation numbers--more than 1270 have visited this single post, out of more than a dozen others on the pond--I felt afflicted by awful guilt. I related this feeling to a friend. He couldn't have quite understood how it felt. I had spot-burned my own best secret. Fishing seemed to get worse and this state of affairs just added to the "wrong" I had done, but as the years moved relentlessly on, I began to come back around to where I began with this blog, my feeling that information never really hurts. Ignorance hurts. And I began to feel a deep longing to come back up here and see if I am right.

My feeling grew that Mount Hope had persevered. Even though I hadn't been back up there to gain any hard evidence, I've plenty of evidence from many sources stored in my brain. Even as a teenager, when I began writing about where to catch fish and getting these articles published, I learned right off the bat that despite big feature titles spelling out where to go, very few people--if anybody--takes the advice by feet and hands. This is not at all to discount practical pointers, but the entertainment value of writing ranks foremost along with aesthetic value, and above all else, by formalizing information, it becomes part of the culture we all share. Knowledge doesn't trivialize. That awful disparaging sense of overfamiliarity is an illusion, not knowledge. It's caricature, not character. A bad mental habit of sloth, inaction, and the wrong assumptions about freedom. (You are not anybody's slave, nor are you under the lock of any institution or job.) Ultimately, my pieces protect and serve Mount Hope Pond. They celebrate, mythologize, and cite the value of this place.

The bass are still there. Out of 1279 visitations of that post linked alone, it's possible a few bass were caught and released as the result. Maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe some people have taken my advice and fully enjoyed themselves. Is that wrong, of course not. Since when do anglers have an attitude like radical environmentalists against the human species? Whatever is the case, bass are here.

I haven't reread this post linked to, but by how I remember it, I wasn't as good as I am now of telling it like it is. I probably wrote about the need to get back in the sticks, but a reader glosses over that and just thinks I'm telling him to follow a trail into the woods. Catching bass consistently here is hard to do.

That said, yeah, there may a few of you who, like me, find it relatively easy to make an effort and cast and pitch with an ever-growing sum of accuracy. One thing for sure: Do not tell me the craft of the cast is limited to fly fishing.