Fishing the Quiet Solitude of Late Autumn on Cape

Fallen leaves and bare trees. The glassy surface of the pond chased down and disrupted by the building gusts of an incoming system. The Cape’s fresh water bodies have a silent, paused atmosphere to them as if the ponds themselves are settling in for the winter ahead.

Overhead a lone Blue Heron circles and glides, coming to rest on the opposing bank. Two anglers, by beak and by rod, creeping the gray edges in search of stirring life.

On these cold days, now far removed from the roiling bioluminescence of the summer surf, I’ll turn my attention to what the sweet water has to offer. This is lonely fishing, slow, and in a way somber.

Fishing the Quiet

On these trips I’ll occasionally break from the gray peace with a quiet audiobook for some simple company. The nature of woods and ponds seem to call of high fantasy. In this failing season of life and death the lines blur and the literature seems in a way to come of life.

There’s an excerpt from a Tolkien poem, a line that seems to touch the experience and the quarry “All that is gold does not glitter”. Lurking under the surface, against the mud and the dead reeds and grass of a past season, the living flashes of gold lose some of their luster as they take on their winter hue. Deep browns, and washed out silvers and yellows.

Yet for lack of glitter, the life and the camouflaged gold remains, tough and pugnacious, the trout and bass, perch and pickerel, remain hungry and watchful in their wintery holes.

I approach these waters with a quiet stealth, it takes little to spook these fish hanging along the drop offs or catching a fleeting sun in the shallows. With an incoming low pressure system and building winds I went out with the intention of spot hopping, targeting leeward lines and quiet shallow coves. Life over size, the intention simply to connect with hopefully hungry fish spurred to feed by the impending weather.

Trekking through the wooded edges of the pond I come to stop at the breaks and along exposed sections of shoreline to make a few casts before scouting onward.

Tackle & Gear

My gear is simple and light. A tiny spinning reel taped unceremoniously to an ultralight rod and complemented with a thin, quality 4 lb monofilament mainline.

In my pockets a couple of small boxes of likely offerings.

The goal, to mimic the resident baits of the pond. Insect larvae and leeches, and the minnows that occasionally still dart in shallows.

My rotation is simple with a few consistent favorites, the classic shallow diving Rapala, the glinting Al’s goldfish and the tiny soft plastic crappie tubes that could reasonably resemble anything from fish to insect.

I make my casts short with the aim to target certain specific points of structure. A rocky drop off, the dead reed beds along the shallow water lines, the converging points of still and windblown waters.

A tentative, slow twitching approach. With the Rapalas and similar hard baits I incorporate long pauses into the retrieve, the jigs and spoons I countdown sink. Working them just over the bottom and crawling them up the incline of the kettle hole and into the shallows.