Suffield side

July 17, 1992
Connecticut River, Suffield CT at Stoney Creek confluence
Fished up river from Stoney Creek. In water at 7:30 am. Jill caught first fish a 7 inch smallie. Water level is extremely high. Fished the shore line. Val took four or five smallies on spinning gear. Jill caught one or two more going upstream. Switched to spinning gear on upstream caught a 2 1/2 pound smallie on #3 Mepps, under tree branch on the shoreline. Photo taken.
Moved down river caught one smallie on Mylar piping streamer stripped quickly, allowed for downstream drift. The quick stripping yielded the strike. Moved to pool below runoff pipes. Val caught and lost a large striper using a popper. Caught 2 or 3 more stripers. Jill caught a large white perch. I caught a nice smallie. Failed to get a striper myself. Will bring popper with me next time.

This is my true home water. Home water has a special meaning, the smell of it, the feel of it, and the color of it. I fished this area of the Connecticut River three or four times a week in the summer months when I was a teenager – dermatologists from NYU, Stanford and UCSF can attest to this fact from the numerous moles, dysplastic nevi, and skin damage on my back and shoulders (back then you went shirtless and there wasn’t a product called sunblock there was only suntan lotion). There is a large island in the middle of the Connecticut River at Enfield called Kings Island. Early maps show it as Pynchons Island, I found a reference to Pynchon in an American Heritage article –

William Pynchon, at Springfield, Massachusetts, was the first Englishman to establish a thriving river trade; because of the rapids at Enfield he built, in 1636, a warehouse just above Windsor, where he could unload his shallops and pinnaces and move the goods overland to Springfield or transfer the cargo to flatboats poled by a dozen stout men who, their labors eased by ample consumption of West Indian kill-devil, braved the rapids and reached Springfield by water. Pynchon’s trade with the Indians was mostly in pelts, which he shipped to Boston. In fact beaver skins were such a common medium of exchange that when merchants struck the first coins or tokens, long before the issuance of government currency, that specie bore a crude image of the valuable little animal and the coins were popularly called beavers.

The island was likely a place where the stout men may have rested for spell and enjoyed the shade of the massive oak trees. I’ve read recently that some of the last remaining old growth forest in Connecticut is on King’s Island.

My history with Kings Island bears a short reminiscence. When I turned 16 years old my friends Scott Downs and Mark Ranta decided we would go over to Kings Island for a weekend camping trip. We couldn’t borrow a canoe, so we loaded all our goods into rubber rafts and a plastic dinghy and held onto the outside of the rafts and kicked our way across the river. Today this is the sort of stunt they would concoct for the cast of “Survivor”.

My birthday is June 24 so the timing was perfect for a camping trip. We had just finished our school year at Enfield High and the weather was in its early summer glory -- close to being one of the longest days of the year. The spring runoff on the river was still flowing strong, but had subsided over the past couple of weeks.

We drank too much beer and Mad Dog 20/20, ate only fish and potatoes, heaved our guts out and ran out of water. The stuff of teenage legend. I remember my legs hurt for days after the trip – probably a combination of the flailing kicking we did to keep from being carried down river, dehydration and a shortage of electrolytes after vomiting for hours on end.

Some great examples of fishing writers and their home waters would be Charlie Fox and Vince Marinaro on the Letort in Carlisle PA; Lee Wulff on the Battenkill in Vermont; Zane Grey on the Rogue in Oregon; Hemmingway in Key West, Charlie Ritz and the Risle in France – the list goes on. The Connecticut River from the Enfield Dam and the rapids below down to Warehouse Point would roughly map the northern and southern limits of my home water.

It is now noted for smallmouth fishing as well as stripers in the early summer. In May it was once heralded as the best Shad Fishing spot east of the Delaware River and can still be pretty good, though shad populations seem to fluctuate for reasons that elude climatologists, icthyologists, and any other sort of environmental scientist studying the patterns of fluctuations of our aquatic biomass.

Shad is a species both distinctive and revered in New England. John McPhee the prolific author of books on everything from Oranges to the geology of the Continental US wrote a book called “The Founding Fish” that chronicles the rise, fall and slow rise again of the mighty shad. A relative of the herring it is a large silver fish, which like salmon spawns in freshwater streams and rivers and spends its adult life roaming the ocean to make a mass anadramous migration back to its homewater to spawn.

Home water is always familiar, much like the home water that anadramous fish imprint upon when they are born in the freshwater, to that same water they return to spawn after a time in the larger more saline water of the ocean. There is an old saw perpetuated by writers that” you can’t go home again,” which is the accumulated wisdom of sourpusses and simpletons. Going home again whether to your home water or your home turf is one of life’s great pleasures. The problem people have about going home again is expecting things to look and feel exactly as they remembered it. If you only accept the surroundings on their terms rather than yours, the homecoming will always be sweet.