Morning of bass fishing sparks memory of a rare June day

Dawn was prodding day with long shafts of sunlight as Hank Lyons eased his canoe into a small cove. Within casting distance of a shallow pocket formed by outcroppings of pickerel weed, he quietly set the paddle across the gunnels and fetched his fly rod. Nimbly, then – but not carelessly – he stood up in the 17-footer trimmed by a bag of sand placed in the bow.

There wasn’t a breath of breeze and the silence was broken only by the baritone chantings of bullfrogs. As he unhooked the yellow popping bug from a reel pillar, Hank recalled James Russell Lowell’s quote: “And what is so rare as a day in June?” and allowed the poet-essayist must have been a fisherman.

Directly, rings of reflected light spread from the popper when it was cast into the pocket of coffee-complected water. Because poppers work best when fished slowly, Hank let the lure rest while the rings disappeared. In the interim, memories of a years-ago June day surfaced in his mind. “Talk about a rare day,” he muttered as a dragonfly lit on his rod tip:

Dawn was drizzling into daylight as Hank rowed his double-ender boat onto the Penobscot River’s Pipeline Pool. Conditions were perfect for Atlantic salmon fishing. The river, which was running a temperature of 62 degrees, was dropping after two days of rain and fresh-run fish were showing in the flows of full-moon tides. After dropping anchor in one of the pool’s several “slots” – all of which were productive at that time – Hank shifted his weight toward the stern so the boat would track smoothly instead of yawing in the swift current.

With everything shipshape, he stood confidently in the stable 15-footer and cast a 2/0 Lady Amherst into the foam line, usually a tip-off to “holding water.” Hank’s eyes were following the sweeping drift of the fly when his peripheral vision caught a movement in the next slot to starboard. As he focused on the familiar motion, he saw a salmon’s tail sinking beneath the surface.

Now, there’s no sense fishing where you think there’s a salmon when you can fish where you know there’s a salmon. Quickly, without reeling in, Hank propped his rod against the gunnel, hoisted the anchor and rowed to the slot where the salmon had shown. With the anchor line again strumming in the current, he picked up the rod and stood to see if he had the right angle for casting to the fish. But as it turned out, a cast wasn’t required. In the next instant, the rod bowed and the reel skirled as the salmon took the fly trailing about 40 feet or so astern. Nothing to it. No more than 20 minutes after launching his boat, Hank was headed home with a 12-pounder.

When the popper had floated motionless long enough so that it was more aggravating to Hank than it was to any bass thereabouts, he twitched the rod tip and the lure responded with a loud, frothing, “BLUP.” As he stripped the slack from the line, his thoughts again drifted to that bygone June day:

Because runs of striped bass also had arrived in the Penobscot, Hank hitched his boat trailer to his truck later that morning and set a course for the landing on the South Orrington shore. Shortly after launching the 14-foot boat saddled with a 10-horse outboard, he swung the bow into foaming tide-rips trailing from ledges supporting a spindle buoy. For the next two hours, beneath a sky as blue as a robin’s egg, school stripers ranging from 2-5 pounds swatted Hank’s trolled streamer fly on practically every pass.

Accordingly – and to relieve tedium, if you please – the avid sportsman paused frequently to enjoy a few of the fascinating entertainments played continuously in the theater of the outdoors. Eagles soared and ospreys hovered while crows scolded everything in sight from their perches in towering pines. And to top it all off, a salmon fresh in from the sea leaped and flashed like St. Elmo’s fire. “Hell,” thought Hank, “Rockefeller couldn’t buy it.”

The bass took the popper in a bulge of water that blossomed on the surface. When Hank raised the rod to set the hook, the tip stayed down. His spoken prediction, “Good-size fish,” was confirmed in the next instant when the bass’s bronze form cartwheeled across the water. After a give-and-take tug of war, the fish rolled onto its side and sculled alongside the canoe. Before releasing it, Hank held the bass by the lower jaw and “guesstimated” its weight at about 3 1/2 pounds. Watching it disappear into the depths reminded him of the fishing he enjoyed on the pond during the evening of that recollected June day:

Rather than watch sit-coms cued with canned laughter, Hank loaded his canoe into his pickup truck and set out to go “bassin.”‘ Smallmouth bass spawn in early June and on that particular evening it seemed that every male bass in the pond was guarding a bed of eggs. Hank lost count of the finned brawlers that took pokes at him that evening, but by the time dusk was shooing the shadows into the woods, he admitted that he was pleasantly punched-out.

“That was a day’s fishing, and then some,” Hank thought as he approached a stretch of shore whose gravelly shallows were shaded by a large, moss-capped ledge. The location always produced a couple of bass and that morning was no exception. In a little less than three hours of fishing, the small popping bug provoked seven smallmouths and two pickerel into fights. All were released.

“Not a bad start for a day that’s still young,” Hank mused while paddling back to the landing. When he later pulled into his driveway he glanced at his double-ender boat lying near the garage. And while sliding the canoe from the truck, he noticed the 14-foot boat cradled on its trailer. Now, because the the Penobscot is stiff with stripers and salmon are arriving on each tide, it was only natural for him to wonder if another of those rare June days might be in the making.