Yellow Perch

We made another brief trip to the River today to check on progress with the house.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, not too much progress has been made on the house in the last couple of months, but Grace did get some fishing in while Dave and I checked out the house and talked with the builder.

Snagged yellow perch

Using a simple spinner lure, Grace snagged a beautiful yellow perch (no harm done). We don't see a whole lot of yellow perch in the Sassafras, but they are definitely the prettiest fish you can catch in the River.

Well done, Grace. Seeing you gleefully catch fish at the River makes my heart swell in a way that you won't understand until many years from now...

Sassafras Day

With Grace having been very excited about the fishing in the Poconos, but not having caught anything, we decided to go down to The River for the day on Saturday. The weather forecast was perfect (low 80s with no humidity and a nice breeze), and the fishing is almost always active on the Sassafras. As an added bonus, I checked in with brother Dave, and he and his Darling Wife were going to be there from noon-ish Saturday to noon-ish on Sunday. So we'd have company (or they'd have company, depending on how you look at it).

Girls fishing

As it turned out, the day couldn't have been nicer, with great weather, good company, and plenty of fish. Other than help with worms and fish removal, the girls fished independently and had a lot of success.

Early sunset over Ordinary Point

I think the totals for the day were 19 for Grace, 10-12 for Julia, 15-20 for me, and 1 for Amp (who barely fished at all). We mostly caught white perch, with a handful of decent sized catfish, a couple of sunfish, a couple of shiners, and a single yellow perch. The girls were thrilled.

Grace enjoying the fire

Another nice (and relatively new) feature was a fire in Dave's recently built fire pit. How can anybody not like a campfire?

Dave's Firepit

The combination of family, fishing, warmth, breeze, fire, water, sunset, and Dave playing guitar was terrific.

Late sunset over Ordinary Point

The Sassafras is one of my happy places, and we need to go there more often. The kids are already asking if we can go again this coming weekend. Which maybe we can.

Dave, guitar, fire and water

Fair to say that the lack of fishing success at Lake Naomi was more than made up for by the action we had today at the River. Leaving at around 8:50, we were home by 10:00pm. Happy kids were in bed and asleep almost immediately.

Poconos August 2015

We wanted to try something different for a short late-summer vacation this year, so we decided to rent a house in the Poconos from a friend of Amp's. We had the house for 5 days, Monday to Friday. It was located in the Lake Naomi private community. Lake Naomi is a 277 acre private lake community with golf, tennis, swimming, fishing and boating. The house itself was a 3 bedroom, 3 bath house a block and a half from the lake (on the other side of lakefront private property). The nearest beach access was a short walk further down.

Lake Naomi with boats

Monday was driving up (2 hours away), getting settled, doing a little shopping since we would be doing some of our own cooking on the nice big grill. The whole community was heavily wooded, and full of wildlife. The first day there, we saw a group of three 10 point bucks in the neighbors' yard. There were birds everywhere.

10 point buck in the neighbors' yard

Monday night we ate at the clubhouse restaurant. It was pasta buffet night and could best be described as bland. Many varieties of bland. But not horrible.

Grace fishing at dusk

Tuesday, Amp took a tennis lesson at the club, which was her first time out hitting since her wrist surgery back in April. It went well and she was pretty excited. We fished during tennis, and caught one sunfish (me). There were a few other nibbles, but they were tiny. This lake would have been fun to fish from a boat, where you could get to the wooded areas and what appeared to be some nice grassy banks. Grace was very excited about the fishing, which gave me a big smile.

More Grace at dusk

Tuesday afternoon was spent at the lakeside pool, after which we cooked a nice dinner.

Mirror-like Lake Naomi

We didn't want to spend the whole few days at a pool (which we could do at home), so we searched out some other possible things to do on Wednesday. We elected to drive 45 minutes to Bushkill Falls, which is one of the larger waterfalls in Pennsylvania. It is on private property, where the owners have set up a whole little "theme park" area around it. There is the ravine with the Falls itself (and a number of other smaller waterfalls), some hiking trails, gift shops and snack bar, fishing pond, mini golf, paddle boats on another small pons, etc.

Bushkill Falls

Bushkill was worth visiting, but was certainly different under private ownership than it would have been as a state park. In other words, more developed, more touristy, and a lot more walkways and stairs crisscrossing the area than a park would have had. But nice, and well worth an afternoon's visit.

Bushkill Falls area with walkways

The girls especially liked the "gem mining", which basically entailed buying a bag of sand studded with a variety of semi-precious stones, and then rinsing them in a screen in a water trough so that the sand washes away, leaving behind the stones.

"Gem mining" at Bushkill Falls

Wednesday evening we got home with plans to cook dinner, play some board games and card games, and watch a show that Grace likes on the Food Network. But it began to rain as we got home, and the power went out. And stayed out. So we ended up driving ten minutes to a Walmart that was running on a generator, and killing time there (there wasn't much else around...). We got home at around 9:45pm, and the power came on ten minutes later (having been out 3-4 hours). We went to bed.

Thursday was more fishing and then more rain. We found a bowling alley not too far away, and had a good time there. We don't bowl much, which made it fun, and a little comical. On arriving back at the house in the persistent light rain...no power. Again. Annoyed at this point, and with a not very good weather forecast for Friday when we were planning to go home anyway, we threw everything in the car (we didn't have much stuff) and drove home, arriving safe and sound by 10pm.

All things considered, it was a decent trip but not great. If we were able to do more outdoors stuff (hiking, kayaking etc) it would have been better, but between the kids' limitations and the weather, we pretty much flamed out on most of that. In retrospect, we should have planned more things to do in the area (like Bushkill Falls) and not relied on the Lake community itself. Live and learn. It was family vacation, and that's never bad.

Fishing, Again

It's the end of May already, and we had not been down to the River yet this year, but we fixed that today. We were able to get down and spend the afternoon fishing, with Grace again catching the first fish of the year, and the most fish. I think she did that last year too. It is becoming a tradition.

We had a nice warm day, and the fishing was decent but not great, with the usual assortment of perch, sunfish and catfish. There was a decent amount of boat traffic on the river kicking up wakes, and that always makes fishing off the bulkhead less productive.

It is an amusing experience fishing with the girls; they have limited attention spans, and do like to fish, but will spend much of the time wandering back and forth between holding a pole and various other endeavors. When I am not taking fish off and baiting hooks I think I spend the rest of my time holding poles for them.

I can't complain though, as I love to fish and should be very happy that my girls have any interest in it at all. I get a great amount of enjoyment out of watching them play, whatever it is that they are doing, whether fishing or just running around the yard. They will not be young forever, and are growing up at an alarming rate. I hope these days continue as long as possible.

Sassafras River - Fourth of July

I took the girls down to the River for the afternoon on Sunday 7/4 to spend a few hours fishing. The grandparents were there, and Dave and Lori were going down for the afternoon as well.


It was another day of small panfish off the wall with only one catfish. But the catfish was a great one. Grace, fishing in 12 inches of water about 12 inches off the bulkhead, hooked this nice one. This is the fish of the year so far, a 21 inch channel catfish weighing in at just under 3 pounds. I brought this fish in because it would have pulled Grace's little ultralight rod out of her hands. Fighting a fish this size on a tiny rod with 4 lb test line is tremendous fun, and it was touch and go as to whether I was going to be able to land the fish. It fought hard for quite a while, and I was just hoping that I could get it up off the bottom so we could see it before it snapped the line. Fortunately, with Dave helping out with the net, we were able to get it in. You can see the size of the fish versus the size of the pole...

On the road coming into the neighborhood, there is a nesting platform on top of one of the telephone poles. This year, a family of Osprey are calling it home. There are three little ones, although as can be seen here they are not so little any more. At least two adults are also here, bringing fish back to the kids. When one of the adults shows up with a fish in its claws, the little ones go nuts and start making an awful racket of squawking and crying out.

It is nice to have a chance to see these beautiful birds right out the car window.

Sassafras River Fishing - June 22, 2010

This post comes a bit out of order, but the lead up to the backpacking trip pushed everything else out of the way for a while. On Tuesday June 22, my friend Maryellen brought her boys down to the River for an afternoon of fishing, like we had done later last summer.



The fishing wasn't quite as good this time around, especially since the day we did this last August was one of the best fishing days down there in recent memory, with a non-stop string of decent sized catfish all day long. Today, we were catching mainly white perch and bluegill sunfish, with a few catfish thrown in for good measure, but nothing of exceptional size.



Nathan and Jack wetting a line. Jack took the prize for most fish caught. Nathan didn't catch his first fish for a while, much to the amusement of his brothers, but did end up with a respectable handful of fish by the time the day was done.



Sam had the largest fish of the day, a channel catfish that he caught on a little Mepps spinner lure. Odd... catfish don't generally take lures, but I guess this one was bored.



What's a day on the water without food and drinks. For that matter, what's anything without food and drinks.



The gang hard at work.



A very nice afternoon, which I hope we can do again before the kids go back to school.

Sassafrass River Fishing, Part 2

...continued.

OK, so they can't all be whoppers. Yours truly lands the smallest fish of the day, a 4 inch shiner. I'm still not quite sure how this little guy got a size 2 hook into his mouth, but he did. This fish could best be described as bait. I should have left him on the hook and thrown him back in in the hopes that a real fish would eat him!


They weren't all tiny. This catfish was probably the biggest fish of the day, and while not overly large compared to some that we catch, it was a very nice fight on the ultralight tackle, and I was sure I was going to lose it when it started to run under the pier. I was able to keep it from wrapping the line on a piling, and coaxed it back out into open water.


I am always amazed at how Grace has taken to fishing at the tender age of 5. She scolds me when I give her too much advice; she likes to remind me that she knows what she's doing. Which I suppose is true as long as she doesn't have to touch any bait or the actual fish themselves.

Proud daddy and his girls.

Grace's largest catch of the day - a nice scrappy catfish.

Another beautiful and successful fishing day on the Sassafrass. The most recent of hundreds, if not thousands. Hopefully there will be just as many more to come in the future.

Sassafrass River Fishing, Part 1

In addition to the kayaking posted earlier, the main part of our sunday on the Sassafrass was for the first fishing expedition of the year. Well, that is if you can call sitting in a chair on the front lawn with a beer in hand as an expedition... We were fishing straight off the bulkhead in a couple feet of water because it was a nice shady spot on a sunny day. Amp caught the official first fish of the season, a small white perch.


I like to fish a variety of artificial lures when I have a few moments to myself, but when the family is fishing as a group, we keep it simple. For us this means bottom fishing with night crawlers. Using this you can catch just about anything in the river with the exception of bass. Even at that, you can catch little bass this way if you are lucky.

The kids love to be on the dock, so here is mom and the kids heading for new fishing grounds.


Fulfilling another important function, here are Dave and Lori keeping the lawn from floating away, and doing a very nice job of it.


Julia's first fish of the season, another small white perch.

After a number of little fish, mom comes up with the first real fish of the year, a medium sized channel catfish. These aren't the biggest fish in the world, but on a 4'6" or 5' ultralight rod and 4 pound test line, they give a good fight and can pop your line if you aren't careful. Most of our family fishing here is on this kind of tackle. Most of our little setups are Ugly Stick rods and small Shakespeare reels. I will use a medium sized rig when I am hoping for bigger catfish, or fishing with lures. Rig of choice these days for me is a 6'6" medium-fast action St Croix spinning rod with a Shimano 3000 FD reel using 8 lb test monofilament line. Good multi purpose stuff.

to be continued.

Background Part 2, About Me

Below are a couple of pictures of me and my girls, Grace (the younger) and Julia (the older).

One of the happiest places on earth for me, filled with more good memories than I can count, is my parents' place on the Sassafrass River. The Sassafrass is on the upper eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The house has been in the family since the late 1950's when it was purchased as a vacation home by my grandfather, and I have been going there since I was three months old. Nothing is more fun than getting a bunch of friends and family together, getting out the fishing poles, and just relaxing. I have included a picture of one of the nicer things to catch on our tidal river, a baby Striped Bass (Rockfish). At certain times of the year, you can catch the little ones off of our front lawn or pier. The little ones are extremely aggressive for their size, and will hit a spinner or spoon like a ton of bricks. But if you want the big ones, you need to go out on the Bay. Five or six of the boys chartered a boat for an afternoon out on the Bay several years ago, but that is a story for another day. I must remember to harass brother Dave about doing that again...

Gracie has especially taken to fishing, and shows off her pro form below (at the ripe old age of five). For two or three consecutive outings this summer, Grace caught the largest fish (channel catfish). Way to go Gracie!