I was trolling the other night by myself on the lake when I lost two Rapala DT10 crank baits, one in a live pumpkinseed and the other in a bluegill pattern. One snagged on a rock pile, and the other on a submerged log, the usual suspects. That’s just shy of twenty-two dollars tied up on the bottom. You have to spend money to make money, at least that’s what they say. In lieu of a live scope or any kind of forward-facing sonar, I used a black and white depth map of the lake to plan my two-rod spread off the back of my 14-foot canoe, a simple reference for structure and topographic transitions that, in all reality, keeps me guessing. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.
When it comes to work, there’s another old saying that goes something like this: the only reward for hard work is more hard work. I can attest to that after the week I had on the water. I logged just shy of 9 hours of trolling this week without putting a fish in the boat. I felt like Santiago from “Old Man and the Sea,” minus the epic drama and the Nobel Prize. I fished depths from 4 feet of water to 65. Aside from the two Rapalas gobbled up by one lakebed, other offerings included a #3 Blue Fox Spinner, a Cotton Cordell Wally Diver crankbait in chartreuse, a Heddon Tiny Torpedo, a Savage Gear 135 glide bait that we found washed up on an island near the Steelton launch in Harrisburg, and a dozen medium shiners on a Carolina rig. Nada.
Tired of suffering alone, I phoned a friend. Mike ‘Flintlock’ Hronich joined me, bringing along his green LED light for what they call pizzaz. We clipped it to the trolling motor battery, dropped it over the gunnel and a bright halo appeared under the Old Town Osprey. I had to wonder what the people driving by along the road were thinking about the otherworldly orb floating on the water near the dam in plain view. Surely there was some angler struck with a small sense of the fear of missing out, and others perhaps just a small sense of the fear in general.
“It won’t be long until the CIA shows up in the parking lot, henna” Flintlock said.
“Hopefully the fish beat them here,” I said.
The truth is though, they didn’t, the fish nor the CIA.
The theory is that supposedly the green light attracts plankton, which in turn attracts baitfish, which in turn attracts species like Crappie, which in turn attracts bigger predators like largemouth bass or walleye or muskellunge. They call this the food chain. We trolled until the battery went dead and didn’t even see a fish. The food chain was broken.
Early on in the adventure, Flintlock turned around to grab the minnow bucket off the middle seat of the canoe, and from the bow I heard a slightly labored “oh no.” He slid off his seat cushion backwards, getting wedged between his bench in the bow and the middle seat in the form of a V, one side in a life jacket and the other in rubber boots. I needed that type of uncontrollable laughter that only comes from fishing with friends.
Another buddy of mine inquired about what we were targeting out there in the dark. Walleye, I said, even if it didn’t sound very confident. There’s something about the witch hazel blooms and archery season that make me think of walleye. For whatever reason I associate them with the waves of autumn, the spectacular color of maples and birches just before the leaves drop. I caught a walleye this summer on the fly rod in the river by accident, from a slow, shallow pool where the bait fish pile up when the water level is right. But what I wanted was to catch one on purpose.
Then I happened to stumble on even more favorable information. Since 2011, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission has been conducting a walleye fingerling stocking program at Frances Slocum Lake. This past April, the PAFBC conducted a nighttime electrofishing survey. The report on their website states that “a total of 39 Walleyes were collected. Lengths of collected Walleyes ranged from 9 – 27 inches, with a catch rate of 38.7 fish per hour. Additionally, a 35-inch, 13-pound Muskellunge was also collected during the night-time electrofishing survey.”
The report features a photo of Area 4 Fisheries biologist Riley Phelps holding a plump female fish well over the 15-inch legal limit, an example of the stable fishery made possible by a successful fingerling stocking program.
I anticipated that my last night out would have finally been the one to produce. But I was alone again, all my friends privy now to the poor luck I was having. I should have kept my mouth shut. Fish jumped all around me chasing bait to the surface. There were loud splashes in the distance: surface feeds that made my heart flutter. I snagged bottom once or twice, and a few oak leaves, but that’s it.
As I trolled in the dark that last night of my fishless week to the faint hum of my Minn Kota 30-pound thrust trolling motor and katydids calling from the trees along the shore, my mind drifted back on all the boats I’ve been on in my life.
The one I knew most intimately was that 14-foot aluminum deep-v hull that I spent all the summers of my youth in chasing smallmouths and channel catfish on the river with my Pop-Pop. Towards the end of summer this year my buddy Duds rowed me around a massive reservoir drop shotting for smallmouth bass. I sat in the stern, with my back to the rower, and the creak of the aluminum oar locks carried me away 32 years in the distance. It could’ve been Pop rowing if I closed my eyes, and I think I did once or twice.
On the higher end, my Uncle Wayne had a F-32 Trojan Sedan Bridge that he kept on the Chesapeake Bay. I can still remember the heavy salt air as we idled out through the ‘no wake’ zone towards a shallow flat in the bay where he would drop anchor. I would jump off the stern for hours, my feet sinking into the muddy sand of the bay bottom. Exhausted, we motored back in for dinner, where my Aunt Evelyn would have a big pot of Maryland crab soup waiting on the stove.
Uncle Ed had a 1976 Trojan F30 Hardtop that he kept at Sodus Bay on Lake Ontario. I think I caught more smallmouth off that boat in two days than I have in the 25 years since I fished off its deck. Reel Magic, that was her name, and it was.
My friend Ryan Grochal just recently bought his grandfather’s bass boat from his aunt. He said it was too important to let it slip away to the used boat market, God forbid it ended up in the hands of someone outside the family. According to Grochal, he was with his grandfather when he bought that boat almost 30 years ago, brand new, strait from the dealer.
“It still has my grandma’s cigarette burns on the deck,” Grochal said.
He sent the picture of it via text.
“He got this six months before he passed away and was only able to get out onto the lake with it a little bit when he had cancer. I feel like I’ve got an obligation to let this thing get caught up on 20 years of fishing time,” Grochal said.
In the beam of my headlamp, I watched the vibrations of my rod tips translate the action of the crankbait way back there under the faint wake coming off my hull. It’s funny, the places we go sitting in a boat in the dark not catching much. The wind came up a bit and as the chop bounced off the stern-heavy Osprey, I closed eyes, a little lonely, and realized that it’s not the boats we remember, it’s the boats we shared.
T.C. Mazar is a freelance outdoors writer and can be reached at wildlife@scrantontimes.com.