Memorial Day weekend is the time most of us who garden where I live in Vermont finally get everything into the ground. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty leery about transplanting tomatoes much before then. The peas, carrots, and other hardy veggies have all been planted and the asparagus has poked up out of its bed – but it just isn’t real for me until the tomatoes are in and I’ve seeded the potato mounds. Now, all the bets have been placed and it’ll take just one good frost or a freak snowstorm to send me scurrying in a panic to find replacements for all of the plants that have frozen overnight. There’s nothing that quite says springtime to me like watching two neighbors fight over the last bedraggled pack of bell peppers at the greenhouse down the street in late May.
Baseball’s fun at this time of year because just about anything can happen and fans of this great summertime sport can talk and speculate on it for hours. I spend a lot of time talking baseball with the folks I fish with. Like baseball, fishing is about watching something unfold over a prolonged period. You rarely hit a piece of water and just start hauling fish out of it. You have to size up the conditions, take stock of what kind of insect life is hatching, whether the sun is a factor, check the water temperature and most important of all, puzzle over whether or not you have anything in your fly or tackle box that would even remotely interest a fish. Selecting your first fly or lure is a lot like picking a starting pitcher. You know what happened last time you tossed that thing into the water, just like a big league manager has all of that pitcher’s stats from last year to review. But, you never know what will happen on any given day.
You can’t rush. There are six weeks in my favorite time of year, over 40 days to savor. I don’t ever want to miss a minute of it.
The rainbow trout and smallmouth bass have been spawning. I love smallies, but there’s something about trout to me. They even have a special name for the nests they dig out of the gravel. The mature rainbows will head out of their normal hiding places and work their way upstream to find gravel deposits where they can dig out their redds (which is just a fancy name for ”beds” or “nests”), lay eggs, and fertilize them.
Rainbows pair off after a brief courtship ritual and will make every effort to find a spot away from other mating fish. A single male will fertilize the female’s eggs, behavior that differs from the more anarchic breeding habits of the brook trout. Fortunately, brookies spawn in the fall; otherwise it’s quite possible that the more modest rainbows might never propagate at all. After all, it’s very hard to concentrate on your one true love’s needs while there’s an orgy of rutting brook trout going at it right next to you.
Leaving you with that rather graphic image now rattling about your head, I’ll move on to another unusual thing that results from all of these rainbows moving upstream. When many pairs of spawning rainbow trout become amorous all at the same time, the other fish in the river may derisively tell them to “get a room”. And that’s all fine, except for the fact that the only upstream “rooms” available just happen to be occupied by all the brook trout and brown trout that normally inhabit those waters.
As the interloping rainbows start to arrive at their upstream destinations and spread out along the gravel beds, they displace the fish that call that territory home. This, as you might imagine, ticks those resident fish off, making them highly agitated, irritable, and aggressive. In short, the whole ordeal puts those fish in a fairly pissy mood. It’s a little like college spring break then, only colder and wetter.
So those agitated brookies and browns strike back and with all of these angry, overcrowded, oversexed trout in the water, you can throw just about anything at them and expect to get a hit.
Essentially, much the same thing going on in the shallows of the smaller lakes and ponds. Bluegills and other small panfish dig out their beds (which is just a déclassé name for “redds”) and they can be a lot of fun on either ultralight spinning gear or on a fly rod. This is great fishing for kids, as bluegills aren’t very selective, even when they aren’t busy getting busy. It’s also a lot of fun for adults who are just having trouble hooking into anything at all this spring. Catching a couple dozen bluegills can make you feel like you might be ready to quit your job and join the pro tour.
Too bad there isn’t a pro panfish circuit.
But as I said, the next six weeks are all laid out in front of us. This is when we get to feel the gradually warming sun, the slow creep of the lengthening days, and the delicious slowing down of time as summer approaches. Sure, there’ll be black flies and mosquitoes, but that’s okay. Fish eat them, y’know.
Copyright 2008 by Peter Cammann
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