I phoned him and we hit it off directly. Danny Barker had grown up in West Virginia, where the New River was home water for smallmouth bass; other mountain streams for eastern brook trout. His family relocated to Newport News, where he began fishing the salt of Chesapeake Bay. Naturally, they learned about the northern largemouth bass fishery of Back Bay-Currituck Sound and Albemarle Sound of Virginia and North Carolina.
We talked about 45 minutes, thoroughly enjoyed. Barker's been guiding in Arkansas, 77 years old, and he's written a book, Musings of a Legendary Fly Fishing Guide. Though it's not published yet, he intends to get it published and advance the proceeds to a children's charity.
Barker sent me the book in PDF form, and I sat and read through the first 10 chapters, uninterrupted. Twenty-seven chapters in total, the book utterly fascinates me. I can't get over the difference between what seems to me a short time ago--the 1960's and '70's--and the present when it comes to fish populations and fishing pressure on them. Fishing Currituck with his father, the average day amounted to 100 to 200 bass between the two of them, with the best day amounting to about 350. Barker says they weighed between 1/2-pound to 10 pounds, not that a 10-pounder got caught every outing, but on the phone, I queried him on his biggest Currituck bass. Ten pounds is a great fish. He caught an 11-pounder from Albemarle.
Striped bass fishing in the Chesapeake was phenomenal, too, the Barkers catching as many 200 of them during a single morning. They fished flounder, catching 150 to 300 a day. Big red drum, too.
After jaunting through my reading, I arrived at the Raritan this morning feeling thoroughly dismayed. It's not just what we've done to fish populations. After all, in some ways the Raritan must be comparable to the James and Roanoke Rivers, where the Barkers caught 50 to 100 smallmouths a day as large as seven pounds, but Raritan River bass aren't there in numbers like they must have been only some 60 years ago. At least above Somerville. (There are about a dozen Superfund sites along the lower Raritan.) I think of Stony Brook in Princeton, where I used to catch as many as 40 a day during the 70's. Try Stony now, and the chances are against you catching a single bass. It's not just fishing pressure. Stony never got a whole lot that we ever knew of. Rather than fishing pressure being an all-encompassing evil, consider that ecosystems are delicate. The more New Jersey builds, the more pressure is put on watersheds in forms other than fishing.
I fished this morning...for a single bass. A Raritan smallmouth a little better than 10 inches long caught on a Ned rig. I did hook two other littler ones lost, and missed a hit, but I felt the lack deeply, and I'll add, deeper than I will likely feel it again, thankfully. I'm no different from you. We're used to the fisheries as we have them. Today was a slow one as Raritan outings go, and, in fact, the water was a little off-color. I never do well when it's stained any worse than it was this morning.
I got out and fished Round Valley in the rain last Thursday, getting skunked. And since I fished only 45 minutes, I felt I had no story to relate on the blog. Flooded undergrowth gave my buzzbait abundant opportunity--45 minutes worth from where I could reach from shore near the main launch--but oddly, there seemed to be no bass among that cover during those favorable weather conditions.
I leave a link to my popular Currituck post. In addition to Currituck, I refer to canals and "Collington Bay," while said bay is not only a thing of mistaken memory, it's misspelled. The word is "Colington," referring to a certain island and small community. The bay there is strictly named Kitty Hawk Bay. I leave the title as is, so as not to screw up the post in relation to search engines.
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