28 Wednesday Sep 2016
Posted in Essays, Kayak Fishing Posts
Tags
Bass Fishing, Fishing, Fishing tournaments, Kayak Bass Fishing, Kayak Fishing Posts, KBF Magazine, Largemouth Bass
My essay about tournament kayak fishing, from the Fall 2016 issue of KBF Magazine. Click on the 1st link below for the pdf file of the article only. The 2nd link contains the full magazine (the article begins on page 73).
Thank you for reading!
01 Wednesday Jun 2016
Posted in Essays, Kayak Fishing Posts
Tags
Bass Fishing, Fishing, Kayak Bass Fishing, Kayak Bass Fishing national Championship, Kayak Fishing Posts, KBF Magazine, Kentucky Lake, Topwater Fishing
Here is the link to my article about topwater fishing on Kentucky Lake, courtesy of Kayak Bass Fishing magazine.
2. Click below to download the entire magazine as a pdf file (it’s free!); the article is listed in the contents index.
04 Monday Apr 2016
Posted in Bowfin, Bowfin in Journalism
The latest issue of KBF magazine mentions the Bowfin in two separate articles and quotes yours truly in one of them. The one in which I am quoted is a feature story by angler Drew Haerer on the topic of fishing for primitive fishes. The article “The Forgotten” (p. 96-99) also features a photo I took of a friend and fellow angler while we fished for Bowfin at Core Creek, N.C., in 2012. You can read it free here:
https://issuu.com/chrispayne94/docs/spring_2016_kbfmag
29 Tuesday Mar 2016
Posted in Field Reports
Tags
There’s a plague in Bowfin Country, and I’m in quarantine. I have the fishing bug real bad this season. As a result, I’ve been fishing after work; yesterday I captured something exceptional on my little video camera. For years, I’ve been watching Ospreys descend from the sky and pull fish from nearby water. They’ll fall in a controlled flight, almost vertically at times, and gently pluck their prey from the surface. Yesterday, an Osprey made a stunning cameo while I was filming some fishing footage. You can see it at the 1:40 mark of this video:
29 Tuesday Mar 2016
Posted in Field Reports
Tags
Spring 2016
29 Monday Feb 2016
Posted in Bowfin
Tags
It’s late February, a time for the Bowfin angler to remember the taste of defeat.Winter lulls the senses, and our memories of last year’s battles with fish dissipate – mercifully – with the cold. Yes, we recall the one that got away. It grows larger with each telling. But we forget how we lost it, and that defeat is often an angler’s fault.
Late winter Bowfin are experts in reminding us of our errors.
I will dedicate this blog post to a typical late winter event: the loss of a large fish from the end of the line. First, a few points about how to set a hook in a Bowfin’s bony mouth. Continue reading
01 Monday Feb 2016
Posted in Book Reviews
Tags
Bass Fishing, Bowfin, Environment, fish biology, Fishing, Gar, In Fisherman, Largemouth Bass, rough fish
Decorous Techniques: A Review of Largemouth Bass: An In-Fisherman Book of Strategies (1990)
Look at the photograph below. It was taken by Dr. Solomon David, a biologist at the renowned Shedd Aquarium. Dr. David is not a scientist to miss the significance of this grouping, which he caught with his eye and then his camera. The fact of the matter is that it represents something many bass anglers wouldn’t easily admit: the Bowfin (Amia calva), Largemouth Bass (Micropterus salmoides) and Spotted Gar (Lepisosteus oculatus) co-exist in the wild. They share waters where they are born, they share food they chase, and they share graves. And here they are, hanging out like three old friends. Very old friends (well, at least the Gar and Bowfin are).
Why the photo, you ask? I posted it because I’d never seen the Bowfin mentioned without scorn in a book about Largemouth Bass. If you listened to Bass anglers, many argue for the eradication of the Bowfin (to be fair, others secretly confess they prefer catching Bowfin, but they chase Bass for the money). Anti-Bowfin-scorn is simply inherited ignorance. And that is where Largemouth Bass: An In-Fisherman Book of Strategies stands apart from the crowd….
03 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in Book Reviews
Perceptive anglers know that a successful day on the water requires a nimble mind. “Successful” in this case refers to the art of figuring things out; a raised fish, a hooked fish, a lost fish, or a landed fish are all better than the alternative. Nimble anglers are the ones who adapt tactics to conditions. Yes, the bite’s been good, and this lure has worked. But now the weather changes, or you lose the lure, or the fish have moved on. What do you do then? Bad anglers continue forcing the same pattern into the water. Good anglers adapt, with mixed results. Great anglers are struck by a figural bolt of lightning, and do something brilliant, eccentric, or simply crazy.
I put myself in the middle tier. Take for example a good late summer bass bite I fished on the Haw River not long ago. Early September is when the shadows hurry to grow long, and the water, clear from a dry summer, moved in a cool, unhurried flow. Topwater action had been hot all summer long so I reverted to habit: poppers and plugs. But this was a section of river notorious for its deep, narrow channels and fish that hesitated to rise. After an hour of failing to persuade the fish, I switched my bait from a noisy topwater plug to a jointed sub-surface lure. The tactical change obtained the desired result, and fish that were in no mood to strike at the surface chase down a lure that swam a foot below the air. Stubborn adherence to established pattern – out. Largemouth Bass on every other cast – in. Granted, this was not the grind of a tournament event, where pressure and exhaustion come into play.
Monte Burke’s engaging and well-written Sowbelly offers the literary analog to the versatility I have in mind. Mind you, I refer to the book. Most of the anglers depicted in it are another matter. Continue reading
15 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Bowfin
Tags
Bowfin, caviar, Environment, fish biology, Fishes, Fishing, living fossils, rough fish
January 2015
It was eight years ago this week, on a warm January day, that I landed the Bowfin in the photo below. I was recently arrived to the North Carolina Piedmont, and if you look closely, you will see that I’m wearing a hat from Lock 3 Bait & Tackle. It’s my favorite tackle shop on the lower Allegheny River, just down the road from where Rachel Carson was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, and a little reminder of how anglers cling to the superstitions of their old haunts. That hat didn’t last much longer after I landed that Bowfin. It wasn’t because I gave up on the Allegheny – I still fish it about once every year – but because this fish marks a break in my life: there is before the Bowfin Era, and after. Continue reading
12 Wednesday Feb 2014
Posted in Bowfin
Tags
Bowfin, Environment, Fishes, Fishing, Gar, Law, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Sturgeon, Three Rivers
The Bowfin in Pennsylvania
The Bowfin and I first crossed paths in Western Pennsylvania. As such, the Bowfin’s precarious status in that region has always been first in my mind and I follow news about it and the region’s fisheries with great interest. The word of it my interest got around some years ago when the Pittsburgh Tribune Review called me in 2009, shortly after a Bowfin was caught near Pittsburgh, and I was featured in an article published on the event. Whether fishing the Three Rivers, reading in the local scientific history (as in Rafinesque’s Fishes of the Ohio), or simply speaking with regional writers and anglers, Pennsylvania’s listing of the Bowfin as an uncommon “candidate species” holds my unwavering attention. Its status in the Commonwealth’s game regulations is as unusual as the fish itself, and so far as I know, the Bowfin enjoys no comparable status in any other one of the 30 U.S. states the fish inhabits.
The Pennsylvania State Legislature is considering passage of a bill that would severely limit the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission’s ability to list species as endangered or threatened. For example, the short-nosed sturgeon and spotted gar (the latter a common fish in the Allegheny River) are protected under current law. By ending the PFBC executive power to add or remove species from the endangered/threatened lists, the bill would have wide-ranging and perhaps devastating consequences with respect to how scientists manage the state’s fisheries. Stripped of certain scientific and legal protections, the state’s fishes and watersheds could further deteriorate in a state already besieged by the political and environmental consequences of hydrological fracturing for natural gas (a.k.a. “fracking”).
In addition to effectively placing the PFBC under the jurisdiction of a non-scientific entity, the bill also raises questions about the management of threatened/endangered species. Now, since the Bowfin is not listed as endangered or threatened, but instead is a “candidate” species, it is unclear how the bill would determine the fate of the Bowfin and other candidate species. I will keep readers posted as I follow the story, and encourage everyone – and not only the citizens of the Commonwealth – to let the legislators in Harrisburg hear their opinion of this proposed bill.
For more on the matter, please read the following link, which contains also links to the text of the bill.
http://blogs.post-gazette.com/sports/rod-gun-club/40397-endangered-threatened-species-bills
For more about the Bowfin as “candidate” species, click here:http://fishandboat.com/images/pages/qa/fish/bowfin.htm
For differences between Bowfin, Burbot and invasive Snakehead in Pennsylvania, see: http://www.fish.state.pa.us/water/fish/snakehead/snakehead.htm
Henry Veggian
Copyright 2014
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