Convergence '20: Catalyst

Herring are the catalyst. My schedule from April through to mid June revolves around them. Without them, there's little to draw me and many other predators to the tidal rivers that are my office in the spring. Herring are the largest baitfish that runs a lot of these rivers in numbers. In some places shad take that designation, but herring are king where I fish. Their caloric content is the biggest draw. Imagine a river full of swimming cheeseburgers, a virtual buffet. It doesn't hurt that it's full of french fries too: spotfin shiners, glass or yellow eels, perch... the list goes on.

Unfortunately in the current fishery having a lot of herring in the river doesn't mean there's good fishing. I said in the last Convergence post that this was my worst herring run year yet, and that wasn't because there weren't herring. Despite my horrible mental state and erratic motivation causing my hours to plummet, I still managed to be on the water for some of the most remarkable pushes of blueback herring I've ever seen.

May 4th brought with it possibly the biggest push of herring I'd ever seen, and, oddly enough, I didn't fish in the dark at all. The run was extremely heavy right in the middle of the day, and though the fishing was unexceptional the sheer volume of bluebacks filled a need to see something spectacular and I left before the good fishing would even start. 

Under the water were the shimmering apparitions of thousands of 6-11 inch fish, almost invisible in the the deeper water but boisterously obtrusive in the shallows, where the males all jockeyed for position behind the fat, egg laden females. They occupied most of the river, a school of fish so impressive even someone with little interest in ichthyology or fishing would be impressed. As is so often the case I struggled to capture what I was really seeing in the water with my camera.

Were the bass there? Yes. Yes they were. Not a ton, not huge, and because it was in the middle of the day they were finicky. But a flatwing given slight manipulations every now and then got slammed a few times. I only photographed the smallest fish of four... because size doesn't always matter. 

So... the catalyst, the herring, were out in force this year. That just leaves two ingredients needed for a good successful spring mission: hard hours and numbers of larger striped bass. Unfortunately neither I nor the bass would hold up our ends of the deal.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

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