The L Word . . .
The Stream Behind
(08 2019)
Low water, light tippet, little fish, and lots of fun over the Labor Day weekend.
Redbreast Sunfish
(08 2019)
Smallmouth Bass
(08 2019)
Mornings have begun to dawn later, and evening falls faster. The truncated time in between spent fishing is a day labor . . . of Love.
That’s the short story near the end of another summer.
The Road Ahead
(08 2019)
— rPs 08 31 2019
End of July Fluke . . .
Proper Beach Fluke Release
(07 2019)
The find for a good start: an empty stretch of beach, early, sun behind, near a narrow point connecting back bay with channel, sand underfoot. It’s summer.
The small tungsten bucktail kebari with perhaps an especially long saddle feather may be swung off a line of fifteen to twenty feet in combined length. The tide incoming or outgoing swings the pattern on a current like a trout stream seam within the greater bay. Sometimes a striper, also short, intercedes, but this season is ruled by the summer flounder.
Fluke Kandy
(NYC 07n2019)
Another summer morning, another sudden solid connection with a fluke on the swing.
A Beauty By the Jetty
(07 2019)
The left-eyed flatfish, the summer flounder, fluke, is game for fly patterns. The black crappie of the sea, perhaps, to my personal perception of parallel connection. The southpaw fluke stands as a visual stealth and surge predator that seeks smaller fish.
Width adds weight to the battle after the connection is made and a demonstrative tenkara rod hookset sets with success. Nothing else quite feels like a flounder on the end of a line: the uppercut take, the fluttering stand-off, the evasions the fish’s nearly two-dimensional form can achieve.
Shorts are the rule. True. Catch and release is not only fun saltwater panfishing; it’s the law. So many fluke caught are just below the legal length that one must assume keepers are in fact almost always kept.
I release all, with the option open to keep.
Path to Fluke Point
(07 2019l)
— rPs 07 31 2019
4th of July Fireworks. . .
How the Fireworks Started
(NYC 07 04 2019)
(* Excerpt from Small Fry: The Lure of the Little by ron P. swegman. 2009. The Whitefish Press.)
Fireworks!
Happy Fourth of July.
— rPs 07 04 2019
Summer Sunnies . . .
Bluegill: the Summer Sunfish — This one lured by a Woolly Bugger tied by Dennis Feliciano.
(NYC 06 2019)
The longest days of the year offer an extended opportunity to “fish local” even after a busy weekday at work in the big New York City.
No excuses. There is always time to tackle with some sunnies around the summer solstice!
— rPs 06 30 2019
Spawning Season . . .
A Gathering of the Tribes: (bass, bluegill, crappie)
(NYC 05 2019)
Shoals of small bluegill gather just below the surface of the open water as the very long shadow of a largemouth bass passes nearby. A large crappie holds guard over a cleared nest within an opening in the weeds near the bank.
It’s May, when all the fish of the pond are active and in sight: Spawning Season.
What a delight it was to see so much piscatorial action in the good company of Garrett Fallon, publisher of Fallon’s Angler, this month. He was in town on business, but found a few hours of time to go fishing in the center of New York City.
He was not disappointed.
First Fish for Mr. Fallon
(NYC 05 2019)
Tenkara offered a new twist in his seasoned hand, which managed to pluck a feisty bluegill from Central Park’s Harlem Meer after just a few casts.
The golden shiner, so much like the European rudd to which he is well acquainted, also rushed to the artificial fly in the bright morning sun.
Golden Shiner, Golden Sunlight
(NYC 05 2019)
Our little trip ended with the big one. The shaded banks and weedy waters held some very large black crappie, the kind some like to call a slab.
A Slab: black crappie dressed in spawning colors
(NYC 05 2019)
May is spawning season; a great time to fish, alone, or with a fellow angler.
— rPs 05 31 2019
Fishes: Subject and Verb . . .
The early season evening hatch has been high water.
(04 21 2019)
April opens the trout season in the American northeast with all its attending opportunity for other fishes.
The salt may remain sleepy, somewhat, as creeks and rivers, ponds and lakes, together offer some of the broadest, and best, steady chances for a day of grand slam combinations of fishes.
The still waters, cold, bottom blooming back to life, offer the angler:
Bluegill
Bluegill
(NYC 04 29 2019)
Black Crappie
Black Crappie
(NYC 04 2019)
Golden Shiner
Golden Shiner
(NYC 04 2019)
Largemouth Bass
Largemouth Bass
(NYC 04 29 2019)
The freestones, tinted by spring rain runoff, flow higher, fish deeper:
Redbreast Sunfish
Smallmouth Bass
Trout
Brown Trout
(04 22 2019)
Diversity rules, rich and simple.
April fishes, subject and verb.
— rPs 04 30 2019
Earth Day 49 . . .
The author of Philadelphia on the Fly celebrates Earth Day “by the book” . . .
(Planet Earth 04 22 2019)
Earth Day has reached the cusp of a human’s middle age. The planet remains older, larger, and more important than all of us people put together. Let us try, at least try, to be stewards and gardeners and protectors rather than mere users of our one and only green, white, and blue home.
— rPs 04 22 2019
ron P. swegman is an angler, artist, and author whose writing focuses on those times and places when and where nature and the city intersect.
