Tiny Tales
Post 2.
Dear Rob,
Like I was saying in my last email, the road in doesn’t seem like it’s really leading to anything of interest - mostly small homesteads and rundown houses where the pavement stops and the gravel takes over - but if you keep going past the hilly portions, you wind up at a boat launch on the upper lake.
It doesn’t look like much at all, and it would be a real pain in the ass to launch a bigger boat in there, but if you’ve got a canoe, or a kayak, you won’t have any problem.
Staying on the southeast side, you wind up in a weedy back bay after a fairly short paddle, and the river is on the right side of it. Now I’ll tell you right now, it’s a bitch to navigate through, but we were seeing fish the entire way down through it. One beaver dam after another, ya know? Luckily some of them had been opened up, I suspect from other paddlers, and the beavers never bothered to fix them.
Count that as a win, right? Anyway, the river connecting the upper and lower lake isn’t that long at all, and it spits you out into the lower lake at the far west end in shallow water. Not so shallow that you can’t paddle, but it certainly leaves the impression that in another month or two, getting through would be a serious pain in the ass.
Maybe there’s a theme here.
So, we get in there and sure as the sky is blue, the place is loaded with Bluegills - big ones, too - but the lake hasn’t warmed up enough to have them on the feed, so there they are, hundreds of them, sticking their backs out of the water to get the sun to help warm them up - thermoregulation is what this is called - and for a long while not one of the bastards will hit fuck all. A tough situation, man.
But, ultimately, we’re back in there for the potential of crappie, and eventually we did find a few. They were decent fish, upward of thirteen inches and a couple that were bigger. Bass Pro Shop aquarium sized crappie, the sort that you know you have to release because you wouldn’t feel good about keeping them later on.
But the black flies, holy shit, man. Clouds of them, no wind, significant blood loss, a constant ringing of the dinner bell. They heard it loud and clear.
What I’m getting at is that for a lake that large, with only seven cottages on it (all at the opposite end, by the way), finding fish wasn’t all that particularly difficult to do, and for that I’m grateful. Across the lake, we heard multiple toms gobbling at each other from different areas, which of course got me looking at possible public land opportunities for next year, but alas, it’s all private property, though I’ve still yet to figure out WHO it actually belongs to.
Typical slip float rig with a tungsten micro jig tipped with, well, anything small and buggy looking, tended to be the ticket, though if I get back in here again, I’m sure that a fly rod will be coming along.
Anyway man, be good. Hopefully you’re feeling like maybe life is getting better, and that maybe what you need is adventure. Some breathing space. A direction that doesn’t seem frivolous and mundane.
- Mike