Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Now that spring and fishing season are finally here, what is the first thing you will fish for? What should I be fishing for?
Chris R.
Not to be an annoying pedant, but allow me to correct one notion at the outset: To the devout fisherperson, there is no such thing as “fishing season.” All seasons are fishing seasons, some just require wearing a ski hat and thermal underwear. Maybe you catch a bounty of largemouth in the summer, and a few sporadic pickerel or steelhead in the winter. But your habits don’t necessarily change, just the kind and quantity of fish you are able to catch. There are plenty of us who regard fishing not just as a diversion, but as medicine for whatever’s ailing us. If you’re a paranoid schizophrenic, and you only take your Loxapine when it’s warm, you’ll spend roughly half your year as a barking-mad basket case. Your boss will fire you. Your children will despise you. Your wife will leave you for the Fed-Ex guy. (Or maybe she won’t—remember, you’re paranoid.) So I’ll tell you what I tell all my fishing compadres: No matter what the weather’s doing, stay on your meds.
One of the reasons I’m not a hunter—aside from preferring to buy my meat at Safeway instead of stalking it through the woods, thus allowing more time to fish—is that I don’t want the state of Maryland (where I live) dictating when daddy gets his medicine. If chasing antlerless white-tailed deer with a muzzleloader was my poison, I don’t need some desk jockey in Annapolis dictating that I can only slake that specific thirst from December 29-31 on Department of Natural Resources public lands. I understand that game-management is necessary. And they can’t just have everyone running around willy-nilly shooting whatever moves. Or they could, but then they’d have to rename us “Chicago.” Plus, you’re not going to catch and release a wild turkey or ruffed grouse, as I do all fish.
So fishing allows more work-arounds. As I’ve written in these pages before, one of mine in the dead of winter is to fish a sewage treatment plant outflow, where the water comes out clean and warmer than seasonal river temperatures, providing a hot-tub effect for fish which congregate in the artificially generated current. It might not sound appetizing, and sometimes the water smells suspect. But it gets the fishing itch scratched, and is still safer than taking a shower in Flint, Michigan.
As for what you should be catching with spring having sprung, geography is destiny. And if you’re fortunate enough to live on the coasts, I suggest dropping whatever you’re doing to fish for shad, both Americans, or white shad, and their slightly smaller but still healthy-sized, feistier cousins, hickories. Shad return from the sea each spring to spawn, running up the rivers and tributaries on the Atlantic side from as far south as Florida’s St. Johns River, and as far north as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Catching them is about as much fun as you can have with a fly rod in hand and/or while leaving your pants on. (Though fishing pants-less will additionally help you avoid unsightly tan lines.)
Silvery saltwater bullets—muscles with scales—shad give you the runs and aerial acrobatics that have many calling them “the poor man’s tarpon.” Sport-wise, shad may be hamburger to tarpon’s Wagyu beef. And many fisherpersons believe they are not living unless they are boarding a plane to an exotic locale and spending ungodly sums on lodges and fishing guides. Which is fine for them. But me? I’d rather enjoy a hamburger in my own back yard with some regularity than a Wagyu feast once every couple of years. (We’re speaking metaphorically about catching shad, not eating them—which we don’t dream of doing in the Chesapeake region, where harvesting shad is banned. Killing a shad, in my book, is like killing a puppy. Even if I admittedly wouldn’t hook a puppy through the mouth, and puppies don’t make roe—shad roe being tastier than any caviar you will ever eat.)
My biggest problem, come each spring, is what I call “premature shad-aculation”: trying to catch shad, before the shad are ready to be caught. Maybe they’re not in. Maybe the water is still too cold to trigger the bite. But a couple of times a season, in hot anticipation, I usually hit the water too soon, with pathetic results.
A few weeks ago, I visited a favorite spot. (All spots shall remain unnamed, in the interest of not seeing any additional people there.) As I kitted-up in the parking lot, a roughneck and his son touting spinning rods arrived at the same time. We embarked down the trail together, for the mile-long hike to the river—me, trying to make breezy banter over my shoulder with them, while speed-walking and not-so-subtly disguising my true motive for jumping ahead: beating them to the prime fish-catching location.
At the river’s edge, I arrived first, dropping down over some boulders—nearly breaking my tuchus and rod—to hog the ledge over a mini-water-fall plunge pool. Which in actuality, is the second-best spot. The best spot being a backwater eddy on the other side of the ledge that serves as a sort of circulating washing machine, where the shad like to hide. The latter is not as showy a hole—most people skip it altogether, as I was hoping my competitors would do once they saw me posted up over the marquee water. That way, I could fish both. But no such luck. They, too, descended the boulders, hit the secret washing machine, and proceeded to catch all the shad that were rightfully mine. Meanwhile, I was practically skunked, but for a perch, a chub, and one lethargic American shad that was bleeding from its side, undoubtedly the result of some earlier philistine coming by and snagging it with a treble hook. I felt less like I was being reunited with my favorite fish, and more like I was witnessing a war crime.
To add insult, a gaggle of middle-school children who looked like they were on a field trip walked up, on the bank opposite the marquee hole. At first I thought, “Oh, how nice, the kids have put down their hand computers and are taking in Mother Nature.” But no, they had come to throw rocks. Not skip rocks, mind you. They just wanted to throw them. The biggest ones they could manage to lift with their spindly little school-children legs: ka-boom! The only way there’d be any fish left for me to catch with the little monsters raining hell down from the sky is if they were wearing hard hats.
I reeled up to go someplace else, and as I did, I encountered a demented looking man-child, sharpening a branch into a spear with a Bowie knife, looking like an extra from Lord of the Flies. “I’m going to spearfish some of these shad!” he declared, proudly. “You’re not allowed,” I said in a calm voice, not wishing to agitate him with his knife/spear in hand. “The state of Maryland won’t let you keep shad.” (God bless the desk jockeys, sometimes.) “Oh,” he said, chastened. “Well I heard they stock rainbow trout around here. Maybe I’ll spear one of them!”
I wished him luck, as I walked past a woman who I took for his mom, having a riverside picnic lunch with his siblings. She looked like Mama June, the mother of reality TV’s Honey Boo Boo. She was about 150 lbs over fighting weight, and was pink from too much sun exposure. She sported a deltoid tattoo, and while I couldn’t see exactly what she and her June bugs were consuming as I passed by (it smelled like Mountain Dew and Hot Cheetos), she was lecturing her children on the evils of diet drinks. “They don’t even got real sugar in ’em!” she said, as though her biggest health concern was aspartame.
This is the way it goes sometimes, during premature shad-aculation. Some say it’s nice just to get outside, and it doesn’t really matter if you catch fish. I don’t. That’s a loser’s attitude. And I live in Donald Trump’s America, where we’re all supposed to be winners. So I headed out again the next day with hate in my heart, needing to exact some revenge.
I rented a rowboat, and took it out on the Potomac. I threw my rock anchor, and tied double darts onto a heavy 30-foot sink tip—a bit of what fly fishermen call a “chuck’n’duck” operation, one in which you could easily lose an ear—but which is necessary to get down in deep water and fast current. In a few hours, I caught 31 hickory shad, feeling temporarily sated.
Emphasis on temporarily. For shad fever does not break easily, as attested to by the writer John McPhee, who has shad fever so badly that he wrote an entire book about it (The Founding Fish). As McPhee points out, it is not patience that rewards the shad fisherman. Or any fisherman, for that matter: “When I go fishing, I don’t take patience with me, having none to take. My daughter Martha is without patience, too, yet she can write novels because her desire to complete the composition overrides her impatience. I can stand in the river three hours catching nothing. Anticipation keeps me there, never patience—anticipation, and the beauty of the scene.”
And therein lies a clue as to why most fishermen, even pessimistic ones like me, are optimists in spite of themselves. By necessity and definition, they always hope for what comes next, even as their responsibilities get neglected and their lives deteriorate, while not quite wishing to be exorcised of fishing’s peculiar voodoo. As one shad-fishing friend of mine likes to say, “I love it when the shad come, and I love it even better when they leave.”
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
