The rumble of the Honda 2.3 disturbed the cool, foggy south Jersey morning as Joe Cermele navigated his Clackacraft up a winding, murky river. In the front was Drew Price, wearing the weary, somewhat tired, but a little bit hopeful mask that anyone has on after three days of doing little other than fishing. I had the same mask on. We'd fished hard in my neighborhood for two days leading up to this. It had been pretty good, too, and I'd managed to get Drew on 11 new species and hybrids on the fly in all sorts of water, from mile long jetties to tiny cemetery ponds. There were some notable chunks of inactivity but there are pretty much any time you voluntarily fish for about 14 hours straight two days in a row.
Fishing that hard can be a bit of an unfamiliar concept to many folk that call themselves fisherman. Even avid fisherman aren't frequently fishing that hard. There's probably the healthier way to fish anyway, here and there for a few hours throughout the week or some long hard trips scattered through the year. Drew and I beat ourselves up, this wasn't the first time. Last fall I drove up to Vermont to fish with Drew on a boiling hot day after he had a client, pounded big bowfin that afternoon, beat up drum the next day, floated for musky the day after that, I went out on my own and stuck a nice one on foot the day after that, drove to Saranac Lake the next day, I slept in my 4Runner next to the Ausable that night and fished in the Adirondacks all day the next day, then went back to Drew's area to microfish....
Fishing hard this way isn't great for the body or the mind, and I'm not quite sure we do it. A focused angler may not drink as much as they should, or will miss a meal here and there. When we do eat, it isn't infrequently absolute garbage. We may apply sunscreen at the start of the day, or wear good protective clothing, but there's always something exposed that gets singed. On this trip it was my lips. They felt and looked more or less like a desert watering hole in a drought. I was applying chapstick prodigiously but it wasn't saving it. As I type this some cracks and cuts are still there.
All that hard fishing was the lead in to this river, and a highly intriguing target species. The catch that started it all happened in Crofton, Maryland in 2002, tipping of fisheries biologists to the start of an invasion. Soon the media was running with it, building a mythical reputation around the species, one that almost matches fear mongering in current events. No, Channa argus won't climb out of the Potomac and eat your pet Chihuahua. Invasive fish are certainly not joke, and the northern snakehead should never have ended up in the waters of the Mid Atlantic states. But the media ran with it and ran hard, while other arguably more impactful invasives didn't get nearly the amount of press. I wasn't hearing rumors about blue catfish climbing into people's lawns with evil intent....
Northern snakehead did spread, and certainly hurt native species, but along the way they've attracted quite an angling following. Joe Cermele is one such devote of the snake, as evidenced by his profile image image as Fishing Editor for Outdoor Life and in the many media forms he's presented over the years, from video to articles to podcasts. Cermele is ate up with the snakeheads. And he really wanted Drew and I to see just why it was he was so taken with these invasive fish.
We had completely unearned hope in the boat that morning. As anglers, if we can't be optimistic what do we have? The mist rose off the water in cool tendrils as the light of the new day shot across the sky in yellow and orange. Piscivorous birds lingered on the banks and dead trees until the rumble of the motor was too loud for them to abide. Gentle ripples and swirls emanated from surfacing gizzard shard. Carp bubbled, rolled and tailed along the banks. It was quiet but lively away from the main artery of the turnpike and the grime and garbage that lined it. This all felt very Apocalypse Now, though we cracked lines from a drift boat, not a PBR, and instead of Colonel Kurtz the foe we hunted with extreme prejudice was a fish with an elongate dorsal fin, narrow face, and ornate, python like patterning along its flanks.
I flexed my fingers as I watched a great blue heron take off from its morning hunting spot. My hands didn't quite feel all there after one day of making cast after bank pounding cast, and looking down I flexed each finger one at a time. I regretted fly line choices, as the floating line I'd brought wasn't quite short and punchy enough in the head for this sort of fishing. It had made me work harder and both my callouses and muscles felt it. I acknowledged this with some indifference and looked back up to the bank, eyeing bits of structure that could hold what we were looking for. Some edges held an almost clover like vegetation that stuck up from the water's surface on short one to four inch stems, bright green and tightly packed, looking like the perfect place for a notorious predator to lurk. The streaking, out-of-nowhere strike of an angry snake was hard to picture but easy to want in that moment. The day before we'd seen but two fish, and only one of them had bothered to move to a fly and had done so only tentatively. Their lack of interest in all of our offerings and seeming absence from most of the water that should have held was a source of frustrating bewilderment for Joe, and Drew and I just had to follow the lead given our lack of experience. Yet we were still optimistic as we started again... why? We always are, each fresh start makes a fisherman feel like things are new and fresh. And they are, to some extent. But if we'd really thought about it, this day wasn't so different. The night was about as cool, the forecast high was the same. The barometric changes were there but minimal and the wind would kick up from the same direction. The moon was only a day advanced and the flow and water clarity was the same. The only real change was an early start, which Joe admitted rarely factored into snakehead success.
When he'd gotten where we needed to be, Joe cut the motor, got in the rowers seat and Dre and I began pounding banks with loud topwater flies once again. Signs of life were positive and it wasn't long before a few largemouth bass showed interest.
But that was just a tease. This day would beat us into submission too. We torture ourselves sometimes. I'm not quite sure why.
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