By: Dan Carns
I travel to New England every year and spend as much time as possible fishing the cold, clean, waters of Vermont. My lifelong fishing buddies are up here and I can never really get enough time on the water with them. I will say that this year has been an exceptionally productive year! Our first chance to get out featured temperatures in the low forties rising to the low sixties. As I made my way outside at 4:30 am a “conspiracy” of 15 Ravens made their way down the mountainside. They spent about five minutes wheeling overhead uttering their guttural call and squawk right over our camper and I couldn’t help but wondered if it was just for me! We made our way to a remote lake in a state park, launched our kayaks into flat calm water, but the lake showed no signs of surface activity. After a good five minutes of topwater fishing and no bites we resorted to our favorite method to catch largemouth and smallmouth bass. If you have never used a wacky worm it’s time you tried it. My buddy Jim Brimblecombe always uses a Yum Bait, Senco style worm in Green Pumpkin with a chartreuse tail and always uses it free style (no weight) in very shallow water. He is incredibly adept at catching bass this way. I on the other hand love to fish with a 4.5” Ned Worm from Roboworm in Hologram Shad with nail weight called a Neko rig. This setup allows the worm to drop head first toward the bottom, in slightly deeper water, where I can then gently twitch the bait just above the grass or rocks. This dual method allows us to hone in on where the fish are and who’s setup works the best. On the first day we boated around 15 fish each, mostly “Smallies”.
The next day our buddy Jimmy Kennedy (professional bass angler) invited us to fish on the Moore Dam which is an impoundment of the upper Connecticut river in his new Skeeter power boat. As I have never fished the Dam and he has spent years getting a handle on it I was super excited to spend the day there. We made approximately six stops and each one produced a bunch of smallmouth bass but it was the last stop, close to the launch, that sealed the day for me. This dam is super deep but surrounded by med to shallow flats filled with boulder fields. Some of these rocks are fifteen feet high and almost all of them shelter fish. I dropped my Hologram Shad Roboworm next to a huge boulder and was rewarded with a big smallie. We made our way around this field, each of us boating several more fish. Just before we left, we made another pass around the backside of that first big boulder and again I bagged an even bigger fish on the Roboworm. My time in Vermont is always rewarded with fishing with my best friends and the cool, clean waters of the north country!
It’s A wild World-Get out there!
@paddlinandfishin
Dan Carns