Greatest Fishing by Joe Brooks

Author:Joe Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811766432
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

It was hunger that took him down to the sea in the first place, but an even more compelling urge eventually brought him back. A month and a half after he first went into the ocean, something stirred in him, insistently, the urge to spawn. And he started back to the river where he was born.

Again he tarried at the tidewater pool, going in and out of the tide, this time getting used to the fresh water. Then, with a goodly high tide he made the bore into the river and headed up. He was “fontinalis,” a fish of the springs, and that was what he was looking for, springs or seepage that would maintain a constant temperature as protection for the eggs that would be deposited on the gravel beds away up in the smaller parts of the river.

And the continuance of his species attended to, he would winter over, and with the spring, with the breakup of the ice, he would head down again and out to sea in quest of the great abundance of food there.

In the old days, Newfoundlanders used to take trout by the barrel during the winter season, and one old timer told me that the fish were so hungry during this period that they would take any bait from a piece of red flannel on up.

“But rabbit’s tongue was best,” he stated. “It was red and tough and we could catch half a dozen on one tongue.”

To protect the fish during their winter stay in the ponds, lakes and rivers, and during their run to the sea in the early spring, it is now legal to take sea run trout from May 24th to September 15th only. The daily limit is 24 fish, except in the Serpentine, Fox Island, Castors and Western Brook, where due to the enormous size of the fish, the legal creel limit is 8 sea run brookies per day.

The runs that really provide the fishing come into the rivers in late July and early August, and the fish come in successive waves, usually in schools of about the same weight, ranging from little fellows five and six inches long, to giants of the species, some of them reaching twelve pounds. Fish eight and nine inches long carry roe or milt and are capable of reproducing their kind.

Once at South Brook, with Fisheries Warden Art Butts, I watched six-inch brookies leap up the face of a two-foot high falls.

“They’re full of spawn, too,” said Art. “Even those tiny fish. They’re on the way up, just like the big fellows.”

I cast and caught one of them, just to look at him. A sheen of silver overlay the brookie markings, proof that he had been to sea. He was firm and fat and strong, as befitted a little fish that was performing an amazing journey, ten miles or more upstream through rapids and over falls. I put him back, knowning that with good luck, one day this little beauty might give someone a sporting battle, when he was three or four pounds, or more.

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