There is something special always about the first fish of the season. These days it’s that first time I manage to get away on my own to one of the wilderness lakes near my Adirondack cabin (my “own” lake—and perhaps this is a good thing—while providing occasional small smallmouth bass or stocked trout is simply not a good fishing lake). But enough outrageously abundant fishing lies nearby….
I load my Hornbeck canoe into my slightly larger, circa 1960’s aluminum Grumman motor boat and make the short trip across my lake, load the canoe onto my trusty Subaru, and I’m off. I have the essentials: fly rod, water, sun screen, bug dope, an apple, several boxes of bass fly concoctions—though knowing me, I’ll stick to the one fly I most enjoy catching them on, a popper built from a cylinder of foam, deer hair held in place with clear monofilament thread, the whole thing covered in Aquaseal, a shiny eye or rattling doll eye on each side.
Now that I have come to know a half dozen or so nearby lakes well comes the task of deciding where to go. Should I make the third of a mile hike in to one exceptional fishing lake, the canoe balanced on my shoulders, rod, paddle, PFD strapped tightly inside, boat bag slung around my neck? Or, better to head to the roadside launch not 10 minutes away from which I can access a range of lakes?
Since it’s my first trip of the year, I decide on the latter—if just to maximize time on the water, and always when I arrive, a rush of emotion hits. It seems I can’t loosen the straps holding the canoe tight to the roof rack fast enough, and it’s is all I can do to not go into a frenetic trot. I have to forcibly tell myself to take it slow, breathe, enjoy the moment. This last time, just a few days ago, I thought I was doing well, that I had at long last matured some as an angler…then I found myself loaded up and sitting in the canoe only to realize I had left my paddle back in the car.
Soon, though, I am underway. Just me and the not even 17 pounds of carbon and kevlar holding me aloft, reaching forward, pushing down into the tannin-stained water with my two-bladed, light-weight kayak paddle, feeling myself glide along, dreamlike, across the still surface.
I hold off on casting, focusing only on the smells, the quiet, the distant murmurings of a pair of loons, the high-pitched call of a raptor. Will the bald eagle nest be where it was last year, the male yellow-eyed and impossibly large flapping up from the enormous tangle of twigs and straw grasses of its nest to perch on a nearby dead limb and keep an eye on me as I slide along beneath him? Will a big buck come lakeside for a drink before the wind shifts and he lifts his head catching my scent but still not seeing me right there, not 20 feet away?
As I work my way through the channel that leads to the main body of the lake, I occasionally move from open water into the thick lily pads just to hear them rustling against the sides of the hull, to reach for spots between them with my paddle blades. Sometimes I spook a small bass laying up beneath a pad and watch the torpedo-like wake it leaves as it dashes away in search of another place of ambush.
I cast a few times, mostly to straighten my fly line with its winter’s worth of un-cast loops, stretching it out with each arm’s length retrieval, popping the large popping bug vigorously with each strip, looking to the nearby grasses and lily pads to see if they might give away the motion of a fish headed toward it.
Then it happens. Between me and the shore and several patches of reeds and stumps and lily pads, a large bass erupts to inhale something from the surface. I check with one blade to swing the canoe in its direction, keeping my eye on the center of the concentric circles, give a sweep stroke with the other blade and shift into stalking mode, watching, listening, hyper alert. I breathe, move close enough for an easy cast but not too close to spook it in such shallow water. And when the fly touches down, the bass is instantaneously on it in a gulping frothy rush my youngest son and sometime bass fishing partner calls simply a “blooosh” to describe this moment, the sound and experience of it.
Rod bent bass towing me forward working to head down into the thickest weeds me fighting against this me smiling all order restored the long long winter wait behind me at last then getting it alongside stabbing down grabbing lower lip between thumb and side of my forefinger lifting into mountain air holding aloft a moment of admiration his big brownish-red eyes the perfect arcing smooth green-to-black shape of him. I remove the hook and place him back down in where he waits for an instant then is gone.
These first trips of the year! These first fish alone here on a lake so unchanged from how it has always been, this reawakening of the deep connection I feel to the world in moments like this that become ever more essential with each passing day.
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