Why Rock Bass Count
Matt Litton with an 11-inch rock bass from New York’s Salmon River during summer.
Rock bass are often caught when fishing for smallmouth bass. Like this one, also from the Salmon River.
Bass of Boyhood
Why rock bass count has been a fascinating topic to write on, and if you really do want to catch some, you’ll find how to catch them in the following paragraphs, too.
I got behind on getting my weekly post out, but we’re back from Princeton, the flooring is done, the movers have stomped through, and now all that’s left is for me unloaded and place our many belongings. We have 65 boxes of books alone. That after I’ve set aside a couple boxes for donation and have thrown out about 10 boxes worth.
A lot of those books I’ve read.
Carnegie Lake was frozen. I got sick, anyway. I didn’t have a look at the canal as a place to fish. I was too busy with a writing project, anyhow.
Once again, it’s an article originally published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News, published by the New Jersey State Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs.
I know, by the way, that hyperlinks can be annoying. They’re not the only reason I prefer to read print, myself. The internet is a commercial entity in a way a book is free from. Books allow you deeper absorption into the mind, not only for that reason I’ve just mentioned, but because they allow you to read for hours.
That said, we used to read newspapers loaded with ads. So are the magazines we still read. I hope you don’t stumble over the links, and that you’ll go back and explore the ones that interested you. A blogger needs—at least with Squarespace he does—to create links in his posts to get indexed by Google.
Growing up near Stony Brook, which flows through Princeton Township in Mercer County, friends and I caught rock bass during Aprils and Mays. I was 10, my friends about the same age when we began. The brook is stocked and we wanted trout, but from the clear water we caught more sunfish—rock bass, too. I loved how “rockies” looked surprised when hooked: big eyes bulging, mouths gaping, muscles flexing.
That first year I discovered rock bass take a Wooly Worm, and three years later, I caught smallmouth bass on panfish poppers. Naturally, my innocence in catching rockies got lost on the bass. Fly casting had added to the experience, but as I became more serious about fishing, I stuck to spinning. That allowed me to bear down on numbers as I began keeping a log. If I noted any rock bass in the “Notes” section, I never numbered them as an “Other” species. They didn’t count towards the year-end total, but I did feel a quiet affinity for them despite my contempt. I allocated numbers to Largemouths, Trout, Pickerel, Smallmouths, Other. “Other” could be anything from walleye to weakfish—most likely a saltwater gamefish. Rock bass remained innocent of the score, but I was rackin’ ‘em up when it came to high end gamefish.
An Innocent Quality
Chubby rock bass from Pepacton Reservoir, New York.
The chubby presence of a rock bass, however, exudes innocence, and as we grow older, we get chubby ourselves. I like to think adulthood’s goal is to regain innocence, but not the childhood innocence that English poet and painter William Blake espoused as Original Innocence. According to Blake, a child grows from that stage into Experience, and if he’s fortunate, he later achieves Organized Innocence. Nothing in a hefty biography I read indicates Blake fished, but he understood a fisherman’s final phase in life better than some writers on psychology do.
I don’t believe, as psychologists might all too figuratively, that an older person “becomes a child again.” So long as the mental faculties hold up, so does abstract reasoning. A child’s ability to do that doesn’t mature, according to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, until ages 11 to 14. Besides, a teenager hasn’t a lifetime of experience and knowledge to integrate into an “Organized” whole. The very “Innocence” of the elder is wholesome acceptance of an examined life put to right.
That brings me back to rock bass. I caught one at Round Valley Reservoir in 2011, when I named a Litton’s Fishing Lines post, “Round Valley Reservoir—Wasn’t Skunked!” Having disappeared from Google, for a while it ranked well. A photo of a rock bass includes a five-inch Yum Dinger rigged Wacky at its mouth. After that episode, I caught many more.
I Became Inclusive in My Log
I hadn’t yet begun including every fish as a number in my handwritten log. A year later, I took a step in that direction after I drove my son, Matt, then 13-years-old, to New York’s Salmon River in July to fish for smallmouths. We caught plenty, but Matt also caught an 11-inch rock bass, a fish I felt moved to behold with utter respect, a conversion happening in that moment of perception.
I used to fish Round Valley for bass with my friend Fred Matero from his boat each year. Fred’s owned a 9.9-horsepower outboard for 44 years, but he’s moved to Barnegat from Bernardsville. On one of the outings, both of us felt very frustrated by rock bass, catching more than 30 of them on jigs along a row of submerged rock that looked perfect for smallmouths. We did catch smallmouths that afternoon and evening elsewhere in the reservoir, never failing to catch some bass. But among those rocks I don’t believe we turned up a single one.
It would be understandable if it were to happen again tomorrow. Just the same, if I were to fish any of my favored clear water lakes and come up with half-a-dozen little largemouths, rather than the two- to three-pounders I’m accustomed to, I would feel frustrated, even though I used to count in my log any bass bigger than legal size. I released them all, but during the 1970’s, legal size was nine inches, the standard I kept until my log became all-inclusive. I don’t want to find that row of rocks again to catch eight-inch rock bass, not any more than I wanted to years ago, but I’d mark the number in my log. And I don’t find counting and remembering the number of fish I catch difficult. I just don’t bother tallying up at the end of the year. Haven’t done that since I was a teenager. I still like to see numbers in the columns of the log, though.
Lake Hopatcong
I’m thinking, rather than Round Valley with its abundance of rock bass, of Lake Hopatcong. To the best of my knowledge, I never saw a rock bass caught there until 2016. My son and I had fished the lake since 2007. Finally, Matt caught a big chunk of a rock bass more than 10 inches long during the fall of 2016. He had primed me to be enthusiastic about it by entertaining sunfish of various species and yellow perch all the years prior, fishing for them with quarters and halves of nightcrawlers floated above medium split shots. A Berkley Worm Blower inflated the tails. On the other side of the boat, we weighted live herring in the depths for walleye and hybrid stripers. Or we live-lined herring for the same species during the summer, though we caught more smallmouths on the herring then.
Since that fall of 2016, I’ve been catching Lake Hopatcong rock bass. They like Yum Dingers. When I catch one, I’m not averse to catching another, so I do slip into targeting them, even though I’m thinking more of smallmouth bass. Both species associate with rocks, and I like the fact that the lesser fish is true to its name. I believe the mouth is smaller than a smallmouth’s, suggesting that the sleek bass would be a disingenuous claim, if a rock bass didn’t look like a cross between bass and sunfish. For me, the Black Bass—largemouth and smallmouth—is the nobler fish, and rock bass outnumber them as if the situation between the species is of nobility not being common. But every time I catch a rock bass, it reminds me of the innocence my son and I share.
Fishing imbued in Matt a foundation of real world values that led to science as a way of life; ultimately, he became a plasma physicist on the West Coast passionate about outdoor photography during time off. He plans on fly fishing this spring, possibly California’s Kern River, and he might go on an ocean charter out of Newport Beach.
Don’t credit me for how well he’s done, without crediting fishing. Besides my refusal to ever get angry with him—though I did on two unfortunate occasions—I was a mixed-up middle-aged man struggling to become a novelist. Only fishing saved me from desperation.
What are rock bass but the innocence Americans take for granted? We prefer smallmouth bass, but we’ll always know the species we love as boys and girls.