Tangled: August wrap-up

I spent August at the old farmhouse on Mt. Riga. Most of the time it was just me. The cousins came and went weekends, and Mom pretty much stayed down at base.

Because I tend to drop things in the morning until I ship some coffee aboard, I took to making it the night before and putting it in one of those big Thermos jugs with a dispenser thingy. If you prime the jug ahead of time with boiling water it really works well. Coffee that goes in the jug at 9 p.m. is piping hot at 6 a.m. This is much better than stumbling around waiting for the ancient percolator to do its thing.

I was somewhat handicapped in the fishing department by two nagging injuries. My right bicep/tricep seems to be permanently sore, as if I decided to bench press 300 pounds all of a sudden, and my right knee hurts when I go up or down stairs, or the equivalent of stairs.

So I did not go out for extended sessions. I confined myself to about half of the lake, simply because I didn’t want to get way the hell out there and have an arm or knee problem.

The Housatonic River is chock full of brown trout, and soon it will be cool enough to target them.Patrick L. Sullivan

I caught numerous fat largemouth bass, and not quite as many and quite as fat smallmouth. Also some surprisingly large perch and two pickerel. No panfish at all, although they were certainly there. And no crappies for the third year in a row.

There was very little surface action. I generally brought two rods, Western and/or Tenkara, one rigged for surface and one for sinking. After I got bored heaving the heavy Bass Vampire around underwater, I’d switch and try a popper or gurgler and some such. Very occasionally it brought something to the surface, such as the time I chucked a big dragonfly pattern and a smallie boiled up from under a lily pad and caught it before it landed.

But for the most part the action was subsurface.

I did not keep anything this year. There is a lady on the mountain who loves any sort of fish and eats them right down to the eyeballs, and I like to indulge her if possible. But her schedule and mine never coincided to the point where a bass could go from net to cooler to kitchen in a matter of hours, and I am not going to try to refrigerate a lunker in our small propane fridge. It wouldn’t work very well and there would be no room for important dietary staples, such as the half dozen bottles of different kinds of mustard, all with less than an ounce remaining, that always accumulate in this setting, by federal law.

I began the month throwing pike flies with a 10 weight, experimenting with wire leaders and different types of short sinking heads, and so on.

But the arm got so sore I dialed down to a six weight Western rod and the lighter side of the fixed-line arsenal, and cheesed the heavy pike flies in favor of standard items such as size 6 conehead Woolies with rubber legs. (Always get the rubber legs.)

Various infirmities meant that the author only made one trip in August into "Snodgrass Gulch," a code name for a favorite brook trout stream.Patrick L. Sullivan

Lake angling was leavened a few times by brook trout hunting in the Riga brook and, more significantly, one trip into Snodgrass Gulch (not its real name).

The latter requires a pretty hefty hike and involves a lot of the motion that hurts the knee, so I was antsy about it.

But the knee didn’t trouble me much, which I attribute to pressing down on dirt instead of something hard like a wooden stair.

So all in all it was a decent month, a little subpar but by no means terrible or disappointing. I’d say the highlight was the improvement in the smallmouth population and the low point was the evening a storm blew up out of nowhere. I went from bobbing around peacefully in the gloaming to getting drenched as the air temperature dropped 15 degrees in as many minutes and fighting a nasty chop in a pontoon boat singularly ill-suited for the purpose.