Scales and Tales

While most Long Island anglers focus on the fall run of stripers, blues, weakfish, false albacore and other salty favorites, those with a hankering to tempt bigmouth bass into sufrace strikes shouldn't overlook September. With temperatures quickly droping, surface waters are in the bigmouth's comfort zone and the fish can be especially aggressive as they try to put on a little extra weight before winter arrives.

Deer hair frogs and mice will draw solild strikes from big bass at this point, while large panfish poppers in yellow, red, green or black should help you enjoy fast action with smaller fish. One of my favorite bass patterns this month is actually a trout fly - a brown Muddler Minnow. Work this across the surface in short spurts that leave a visible wake. Of course, all of these patterns are best presented with floating lines. BTW, fishing is okay even at mid-day this month if skies are overcast.

One key to scoring while using fly-rod poppers at this point is to target your casts at any remaining green vegitation. Also, it helps to work the deep-side edge of weed matts as the bass are now beginning to move away from shore.

A few places to try your luck: Massapequa Reservoir, Patchogue Lake, Kahlers Pond, Swan Pond in Calverton, Peconic River above Edwards Avenue, Forge Pond, and Fresh Pond on Shelter Island. Have fun!

The topwater feeding binge continues on the freshwater front. Sweetwater fans tossing Hula Poppers, Jitterbugs and deer hair frogs have all reported success when fishing in the early morning, late evening or after dark. The bass in Patchogue Lake, Forge Pond in Riverhead, Swan Lake in Calverton and Kahlers Pond in East Moriches have been particularly receptive.

Austin Rutcofsky, fishing at the Wantagh Twin Ponds on Monday, took advantage of some lily pad edges to prompt some big surface strikes around 7:15 p.m. Austin was working a Spro topwater frog and said he had “a really good feeling about the area” when the lilies parted and a 19-inch, 4-pound bigmouth exploded on his lure. Twenty minutes later, a 22-inch, 5.2-pound lunker took the same lure in the same spot. The second fish was the teenaged angler’s biggest bass to date.

More to come later today, check back.

I remember seeing my first hatch of the 17-year cicadas back in 1973. Just entering my ‘teens at the time, I was already a die-hard largemouth bass fan, and enjoyed catching pickerel, bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish as well. It was sometime during that June when I read a piece in a fishing magazine about “matching the hatch,” for trout. The basic theory held that trout favored whichever hatching fly or terrestrial insect was in the greatest supply at the moment, and matching your flies to that particular insect would virtually guarantee fishing success.

Well, it didn’t take long before I was casting grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, caterpillars and just about any creepy, crawly bug I could find to the captive audience of fish in Sayville Mill Pond, Bayport’s Lotus Lake, and even Cow Pond, a small puddle toward the south end of Sayville’s Broadway Park that once held a few panfish, bass, bullfrogs and leopard frogs. Cow Pond has dwindled to a tiny puddle over the years, and biologists fear that leopard frogs may by now be extinct on Long Island, but the lessons learned fishing that summer have held with me to this very day.

So it was that I found myself thinking back to those glory days while examining cicadas from the woods of Ridge late last week. As I pondered how to match their size and shape, I recalled using them for bait that long ago summer. When the hatch ran its course and my supply of free bait came to an end, I struggled to keep the action alive by tossing various surface poppers. Eventually, I settled on casting a small, black Jitterbug. I would toss it out near weed beds, twitch it gently once or twice, and then reel it back with a slow and steady retrieve. The bass smacked that little lure right through the end of the summer – and I was forever hooked on topwater action.

I’m happy to report Jitterbugs are still included in my freshwater arsenal, and they still work great, especially for tempting largemouth bass after dark. Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve been throwing a one-quarter-ounce size during the day on several ponds and the surface strikes have been furious, especially in the late afternoon when cicadas are most prone to take to the air. My guess is that the cicadas have become the hatch to match on some freshwaters in mid- and eastern Suffolk County. If you have a black Jitterbug rattling around inside your tackle box, break it out for a few casts. You may find the response tremendously explosive.