Mark told me it rained buckets yesterday up his way, but the ground must have absorbed it, because the river wasn't high and not off color. (I did notice on the way home that the South Branch at Long Valley was muddy.)
We took a long hike in, and when we began fishing, I had that sense of nothingness come over me, as if the river wasn't going to give back. Even though Mark caught a seven-incher pretty quick, I wasn't convinced. But you've got to meet the river on its own terms. It's full of creatures like smallmouth bass and trout, all of them struggling to stay alive, so you've got to get in the water and be an effective predator like them.
It didn't take too long before I broke past the spell and hooked a bass on half a Yum Dinger, a pretty good fish that got off the hook. It had taken some sense to break the worm in half. If I were just standing there, casting and reeling back, giving no thought to the fishing, taking in no perception, I'd use only the full five inches. Maybe I would never have caught my first Musconetcong River smallie, photographed above.
Mark had gone further upstream and got into a lot of little bass he caught on a little pink plastic worm I decided to take to the trail and walk way up. I found a stretch my head told me was too shallow. My experience and intuition told me something else, "This is the kind of spot where I might hook a big one." My head or ego allowed the feeling only on condition that I could leave the stretch fishless with no loss to him. What's more, my ego allowed me to look at the stretch and see a little #5 Rapala floater working. (What if it weren't to work?) To tell you the truth, I always play it pretty fast and loose with my ego. He knows I find ways when all he does is doubt.
I tied on the floater. I found that without a little snap, it still jerked around in the water convincingly. That no doubt--convincingly to a bass of two-and-a-half or maybe three pounds. I hooked the fish and thought I got a snag. A moment passed and I felt a a throb. The fish was on two or three seconds, but I never budged it, it was so big. I saw a huge boil on the surface after the hook pulled. Next cast, I caught another little bass like my first one.
I went further upstream and phoned Mark. He would meet up with me soon. When he did, I was fishing a very interesting deep run, though I'd had only a couple of hits on a Senko, maybe from sunnies. I put a jig and Berkley Leech down, snagging a sucker. Quite a tussle but nothing like smallmouths fight. Mark joined in and broke out his box of nightcrawlers. Downstream, he had caught a rainbow trout on one of them. After a few trials of nightcrawler-weighted-by-split-shot and carried through the deep sluice, he hooked a big smallmouth.
"Look at the size of that thing," he said.
The fight was long and involved. A lot of drag screeching. We both saw the bass plainly in the clear water, and I was sure it was north of 17 inches. Eighteen? I didn't think it was quite that long, but we would measure it to be sure. I had my Stanley in the bag. One of the little 12-foot tapes.
Finally, I had Mark's net in my hand and in the water. I felt relaxed and ready to lift, once Mark brought the bass over the net. That would happen in a matter of seconds. The line broke. We both saw the break in the knot. The knot had gone bad. It had held that fish until the last moment.
