The Tionesta Creek was best known as a trout fishery. It was a beehive of activity from season opening in mid-April through about early July when the water warmed enough for the trout to get lazy and stop biting. Then only the purist dry fly anglers were out in the evenings. We spent much more time at camp in the summer and we were much better bass fishermen than we were for trout. While we had more success in the mornings and evenings we spent the best part of most days trying different techniques to catch the “bronzebacks”.
Under the bench on the back porch was a foot locker full of old tennis shoes. We never threw a pair away – we just took them to camp. Each day we would don a swim suit, a tee shirt and a pair of old tennis shoes and head for the creek. I can remember there was great anticipation each morning as to whether the fish would be biting or not. Of course now I know about all manner of things that impact on fish habits such as moon phase, barometric pressure, water clarity, creek flow, and water temperature, etc. In those days it was just a crap shoot to us – they were either hungry or they weren’t.
The Tionesta was a series of pools and riffles. The smallmouths could be found primarily in the pools and we got to know where they would be at any given time. The problem was what to offer them.
Artificial lures were my preference for the obvious reason that you didn’t have to find bait and then continually freshen it on your hook. My favorite for daylight use was a small orange flatfish (yes, Fred Myers would have been proud) with three sets of treble hooks. This was an unusual set up and I spent way too much time untangling the hooks from one another. However, if a fish hit the lure, you had him. I also used various crankbaits and spinnerbaits in the daytime but when dusk approached I immediately switched to one of two old standbys – the jitterbug or the hula popper. As far as I’m concerned there is no more exciting moment on the water than when a smallmouth hits a surface lure. After dark you can’t see the water explode but you can hear it and in the quiet of the forest it is a sound like no other.
I remember one particular evening when Johnny and I set out to fish from “the big rock.” This was an area of the creek bank just below the camp that featured a series of large boulders with overhanging hemlock trees. A flat rock jutted into the creek and made casting from it easy. An adjacent boulder rose about ten feet above the creek and if you were careful you could flip your offering from atop it. As we approached the rocks and ducked underneath the hemlock limbs a great blue heron took off from the creek bank a few feet in front of us. I doubt a 747 could have scared us any more. After our heartbeats returned to normal we both tied on jitterbugs and began to cast from the flat rock to the far side of the creek. It was clouding up and getting so dark that sometimes the only way to know where your lure landed was whether it clicked into the rocks or plunked into the water. It seemed that the closer you could get the lure to the opposite bank, the better your chances of a strike – as though the bass actually did think our jitterbugs were frogs and they were waiting for them to jump from the bank. It was a thrill to hear the lure hit the water, then the rhythmic gurgle of bug as it waddled back and forth, then a big splash combined with a tug on your rod as the bass struck. After we had each landed a couple of nice bass it began to rain – gently at first and then a steady downpour. Johnny suggested we head up the hill to camp but I questioned why we would leave when the fish were biting. He agreed and recommended we move back a little under the protection of the hemlock. We were still getting wet but the rain was not so bothersome under the tree. We were catching fish on almost every cast now. Somehow being soaked to the skin didn’t bother us quite so much when we were catching fish. Before long we heard Mom call us from the camp. She and Dad were playing cards on the screened porch and enjoying the sound of the rain on the roof until they realized we were still down at the creek. They couldn’t believe that we didn’t have the “sense to come in out of the rain.” Reluctantly we agreed to come home. While we hated to leave biting fish the fireplace sure felt good when we reached the camp. Then we thought it was quite a coincidence that the bass were so voracious during the rain. Now I realize that the fish were responding to the sudden drop in barometric pressure. Whatever the case it was the most fun I’ve ever had in the rain.
When it came to live bait a bass would take a nightcrawler but so would just about everything else (chubs, suckers, rock bass, sunfish, mudpuppies, and hellbenders). There is no more ugly creator that swims the waters of the earth than the hellbender. They are large salamanders, normally more than a foot in length. They exchange air through wrinkly folds in their skin and they have a flat head that looks like someone hit them with a shovel (it should be noted here that one could hit them over the head with a shovel and nothing would happen). They are almost impossible to hold onto if attempting to extract a hook so whenever I caught one I merely cut the line and returned them to the deep. While a variety of species would also take a crayfish there was a much better chance that you would catch a bass with one.
One Saturday afternoon we were using crayfish for smallmouth and Johnny found a soft-shell. (Crayfish shed their skin every so often as they grow in size and for awhile afterward their shell or “exoskeleton” is quite soft.) These are somewhat easy to spot with the eye but as soon as you grab one you can tell immediately what you’ve got. What you have is a real delicacy to a smallmouth bass. The creek was clear and you could spot the bass in their typical lairs. When Johnny made his first presentation to a nice-sized bass with the soft-shelled crayfish the bite was almost instantaneous. From then the search was on. It seemed from our very un-scientific survey that less than five percent of all the crayfish we encountered were soft. That meant turning over a lot of rocks in the shallows of the creek to find one. As soon as we did we were off to find a bass. On that day it seemed they were not interested in anything else. If you found a soft-shell, you caught a bass. It was too bad that we spent such a large part of the day bent over looking for crayfish as opposed to fishing. They sell soft-shells at the bait shop but we had never bought anything at the bait shop before and weren’t about to start when they could be found for free (by turning over a hundred rocks). Such was the Fleeger accounting philosophy. I suppose during the entire afternoon we caught about a dozen soft-shells and about as many bass.
Boy, were we stiff and sore the next morning. We wanted to get up and go right back to the creek but Sunday mornings at camp meant putting on good clothes and heading for the small (really small) Methodist church in Barnes (a really small town a few miles up the road). Attendance was probably about 40 or so and most of the folks recognized our family as visitors from the “big” Methodist church in the “big” town of Slippery Rock.
The best thing about going to camp for the weekend was getting there and the worst was going home on Sunday afternoon. It signaled the end of leisure for another week and the beginning of another week at school. Not that I didn’t like school, I just loved those times in the woods and streams of the Allegheny Plateau.
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