Storms bring fishing to a crashing halt, keep boats on shore

“In March the soft rains continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sunk beneath the ground.” — John Steinbeck, "East of Eden"

“March is for remembering.” — "The Old Man and the Boy"

“Nature,” my friend Capt. Rick Yakimowicz often remarks, “is the best fish conservation plan you can have.”

This week the savvy skipper is sure right, as first lashing northerly winds of “Sandy-ish” velocity ripped through the region, uprooting trees, upending dry-docked boats and putting an absolute halt on fishing efforts.

Prior to this things were starting off rather nicely, with some pretty yellow perch showing and an earlyish shot of white perch on the prowl. Even some saltwater species were showing in the bay, with some big old linesiders hitting the decks of commercial boats.  

All of that has come to a crashing halt for sure. As I write this I’m looking out the window and the trees are thrashing like schooner masts heaving in the waves of a tempest.  Snowflakes the size of silver dollars are driven by the easterly winds and the marsh is as full as I’ve seen in years. 

Even after the winds subside (as much as they ever really DO subside) the water will be cloudy and stained, and debris will be littering the waterways.

If you are looking for another venue to wet a line that doesn’t require you to make sure you aren’t chewing up some storm-sluiced debris in your prop, you can avail yourself of some stocked trout fishing in one downstate pond.

Stocked rainbows furnish sport for winter-weary anglers and the pond sure isn’t susceptible to the vagaries of tide-swollen water. These fish fall for a variety of offerings such as salmon eggs (rainbow trout have a collective unconscious, it seems, that programs them to eat these things though, certainly they’ve never seen the Yukon), Power Bait (in addition to a collective unconscious, it appears rainbow trout have the IQ of a houseplant and are attracted to Playdough that smells like a sack of dead grass shrimp), spinners, worms and even canned corn.

As the waters recede there is certainly the chance that some white perch fishing might be on tap. I must confess that the snap of two weeks of 10 degrees below the Sussex County average temperature of 55 degrees is undoubtedly due to my coaching baseball and for that I’m heartily sorry. 

The flip side to that, of course, is that since I’ll be coaching the white perch should WALK across land to jump on angler’s hooks so I can hear all about it. Fishermen should anticipate the torrid bite to last until sometime around 5:30 pm when practice is over.

It’s almost Lurefest time again! Savvily set later in the year the event kicks off at 10 a.m. on April 7 and lasts until 4 p.m.

Billed as a gathering of “local and not so local” anglers, the affair has all sorts of presentations and a kids area. Various raffles are also in the offing.

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Tickets are $10 in advance and $20 at the door. As always, Lurefest is being held in charming and picturesque Bowers Beach, Delaware, at the fire hall, and is well worth the price of admission for the stories themselves.

Another nor’easter is on tap for Sunday into Monday, so you may want to give it a whirl before then. Good luck and good fishing!

Reports or questions to captjackrodgers@comcast.net.