While riding my bike on a particularly warm day a few weeks back, I thought I heard the first peep of a spring peeper frog coming from the swamp that runs along one of the few dirt roads in my little Connecticut town. I had sought out this road since having purchased a gravel bike last year, I figured I’d better find a legit place to ride it. For me, though, peepers (and forsythia blooming) mean one thing: “schoolies”! For those who don’t know, this is the term for striped bass that winter over in a few local, Connecticut rivers (unlike their often much bigger and more adventurous relatives who swim up into the Hudson or all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay when winter rolls in). Schoolie striped bass are smallish, anywhere from a pound up to 10-12 pounds for a really big one, though you occasionally catch them as small as your hand (or as long as a limb).
A wizened local fly fishing guide I met and fished with years ago who claimed to fish in the Long Island Sound every day of the year (I believe him) told me about the peepers and forsythia being signs of the beginning of the schoolie run—and as with just about everything he told me (about fly fishing, at least) he was right. While you can with enough persistence and a good fish finder fish for them all year by dropping bait down deep, right into their midsts where they school together by the hundreds, expending as little energy as possible to make it through the long winter, I prefer to wait until they are actually hungry and on the move (and you are much less likely to kill them by tempting them to use up their last stores of energy).
Since hearing that perhaps imagined peeper, I’ve heard not a peep, we had a real-ish snowfall, and, sadly, temperatures look to remain stubbornly far too cold for small frogs, forsythia or striped bass for the foreseeable future. So now is the time to go through gear, make sure I have a fast sinking fly line (they will hold low in deep, fast moving water) that my neoprene waders haven’t sprung a leak (cold spring rivers will quickly turn your feet into unfeeling stumps without good, dry waders), and check my supply of olive and chartreuse Clouser minnow flies (these simplest of flies tied small and sparse but with extra chunky, weighted eyes to keep them low in the strong currents).
Spring schoolie fishing is about wading deep, chucking heavy, hard-to-cast line as far as possible, hoping the coils of line will unravel smoothly from your stripping basket as you make the final strip of a “double-haul” cast, then letting the fly settle in the murky, swirling-cold current and starting the one-strip-a-second retrieve. Strip-strip, wait, strip-strip, wait, the strike coming, if it comes, on the “wait,” so you have to feel for it, sense it. At its best, spring schoolie fishing is about catching a fish on nearly every cast until your arms get so tired you finally walk away with everything still “on,” noticing for the first time that you can’t feel your feet any longer, that you’re shivering all over. Or it’s about casting out into a frigid river, catching nothing, snagging an occasional rock or stump or old bicycle or washing machine (in certain local rivers), this the only break in the monotony, the full-on awareness of your misery.
But in either case, a part of me—a big part of me—is always thrilled to be out there again, watching my line vanish below the surface, waiting for the magic of that first hook up, connecting once again to something hidden and unseen, reaching out and grasping between thumb and curled forefinger and lifting just enough to twist out my barbless fly and watch it vanish with a quick dart down and away, another season begun.
*photos by the author
Upgrading to a paid subscription will help me greatly in the creation of this newsletter (and in paying my bills). You can make a one-time contribution HERE.
You can listen to my podcast on the works of Ernest Hemingway HERE
You can watch my introduction to my YouTube series on Film Noir HERE