Large Ponds for Bass In New Jersey
Mount Hope Pond is 18 acres. It takes an hour of parting the brush as you go, and removing ticks, to catch a largemouth or two, but it’s been some of the most rewarding fishing I’ve done.
The Latest for the Regulars
There’s nothing wrong with pickerel, panfish, and perch, but I’m keeping the focus on bass in large ponds of 10 to 30 acres. I even mention smallmouth, but since, obviously, very few of them exist in New Jersey ponds, the article will mostly be about largemouths.
Until I get Substack up and can link to that device to this website, I’ll be telling my regular readers what’s up on the current front. With Substack, you can sign up for the same kind of short posts on same-day fishing I used to do on Blogger. But I’ll probably do it every two weeks, maybe once a month. Some of the fishing I do will get filtered out, whereas with Blogger, most of it made it into cyberspace, but the most important thing is to keep that personal spirit of the writing alive. My wife told me last night over dinner at Rod’s, Morristown, that I should go back to the old blog, but the current one has turned out to be an investment in a new style. Some good news is that the end of this piece brings back some of the personal disclosure I’m known for. Some of us are just meant—as rare as we might be—to be like big coconuts cracked open and to share that delicious beverage from inside. What can I say?
For the nonce, I fished with Cronk in his boat again. This week I caught a pickerel of about 20 inches, and a largemouth of about eight inches. I lost what we’re sure was a largemouth of two-and-a-half to three pounds. That happened because of a jig with a cheap hook that bent. That hook was on the way to being straightened out. I’m not perfectly certain the bass did it but almost.
Again, the water was 84 degrees. How that could have been the case—my thermometer said so, as well as Brian’s—I don’t know. Brian told me the temp that morning at his house was 59, and we fished only five minutes away.
All the fish, including the good-sized bass that came off that hook, took a 16th-ounce jig with a white twister fished on a light-power rod. I also tried an eight-inch blue Chompers, and I trolled a Storm Hot ‘n Tot.
Brian came up empty.
Once again, the original article got published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News of The New Jersey State Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs.
At 30 acres, Round Valley Pond is the largest I’ll mention, but no one seems to have any doubt that it’s a pond compared to that big reservoir beside it.
Large Ponds: Another Kind
Large Ponds of 10 to 30 acres situated in New Jersey’s Highlands belong to another class than the small ponds recently discussed. I want to emphasize, though, that especially if you’re new to bass fishing, they might be worth your time, so here’s a link to small pond fishing in New Jersey, good for elsewhere, too. I cited some South Jersey examples in that article, because I’ve fished quite a few. My South Jersey experiences of large ponds isn’t as much. I will say, though, that since my friend Fred Matero moved to Barnegat, he’s been doing well at a number of them.
Decades ago, I did fish a weedy pond in Manahawkin that might be 20 acres, catching bass on spinnerbaits. Also in Ocean County, I had the opportunity to fish a pond on Joint Base McGuire-Dix twice as a Bernardsville Boy Scouts parent, and many years before, a pond on the campus of a public college. The McGuire-Dix pond is about 15 acres and full of bass-producing timber. I don’t remember the approximate acreage of the college pond, except that it’s fairly large.
I’ll try to keep the story in the past tense for you, because, besides two of them I ice fish, I no longer fish these ponds. For the most part, I fish lakes. I also love my rivers, and I’ve really been meaning—in the spring or fall—to use my two weight fly rod on little cricks for wild and native trout. I’ve done some of that, catching some trout, but I’m not through with it. It’s as I used to say more than a decade ago in the other blog. I fall in love with places, then inevitably, I move on.
Scenic Saffin’s Pond. As I recall, Author Oliver Shapiro never got this pond into his book Fishing New Jersey: A Guide for Freshwater Anglers, because I took him fishing there and it was all new to him. I remember learning the pond is 12 acres, though I don’t remember the source, and another source says it’s 14 acres.
Nice largemouth from Saffin’s Pond. I wasn’t a Senko thrower. I threw an eight-inch Chompers on an inset hook. I’ve become more of a Senko slinger.
At the Mendham Scouts pond, this young man caught the first fish he had ever caught, on the first cast he had ever made.
Round Valley and the Highlands
In the Highlands, I’ve fished some ponds of 10 and 12 acres, and a few others 18 and 19 acres. I’ve fished others still on a one-time basis, and I still ice fish 30-acre Round Valley Pond, though I used to do well from the bank, no longer viable as they’ve closed the gate over the dike. All of these ponds are public besides one of them owned by a municipality being semi-public, requiring the purchase of an admission badge, and another privately owned in Mendham, where I had the privilege of fishing with the Boy Scouts a few times. All of the ponds but the one in Mendham, the semi-public pond, and Round Valley as it used to be accessible, produce bass stubbornly, which means you have to work to put together a small catch, but the fish are good-sized. I’ve never witnessed anyone take any home; apparently everyone practices catch and release, and I really didn’t often encounter other anglers.
At the 10-acre pond owned by the municipality, on one occasion of fishing maybe for two hours, I caught five bass from 17 to 19 inches and a couple around 15 inches. There have been occasions at other of the ponds when I’ve caught more than expected on a given outing, but usually I’ve caught one or two. An outing lasts about an hour; the longest I’ve fished any of the ponds was three hours. I used to fish 18-acre Mount Hope Pond on lunch break, once catching five bass, three of those over 16 inches. I almost never got skunked, but I appreciate the work it takes to catch no more than a few bass, possibly one of them as big as 18 inches or better. I cast and pitch Chompers traditional-style worms rigged unweighted on inset hooks. Fishing submerged brush along shorelines leads me along sketchy trails that require some bush whacking and removing ticks afterwards.
As I continue to fish Round Valley Pond through the ice, I do Mount Hope, also.
Saffin’s Pond, at 12 or 14 acres, is the smallest body of still water I know to contain an apparently reproducing population of smallmouth bass. This one is the only one I ever caught there, but it remains interesting to this day.
Short Outings
The shortness of outings especially sets apart my pond fishing from my small lake fishing that often involves five hours or more. The bass are the same size. Seventeen- and 18-inchers are common, 19- or 19 ½-inchers get caught on occasion, but 20-inchers never get caught except on a private lake of maybe 50 acres where they’re common. A few times at 12-acre Saffin pond, I’ve fished before going to work. On another occasion, my son and I fished that pond on the way home from Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, when I caught an 18-incher that capped off the day very nicely. I caught another 18-incher at the same pond, that one on a surface plug, about seven weeks later while fishing with Oliver Shapiro. He doesn’t cover the pond in his book Fishing New Jersey: A Guide for Freshwater Anglers, but he does write about a couple of the 18- and 19-acre ponds I used to fish: Mount Hope Pond and Lake Ames respectively. In fact, if it weren’t for reading Oliver’s book more than a decade ago, I might never have taken the clue to those two.
The Chompers weightless on an inset remains a great way to catch pond bass. We try to avoid gut hooking, and I think I had already unhooked this one, and put the worm loosely there.
Average-sized bass from a North Jersey pond.
Worming Skills
The large ponds I fished developed my worming skills as no other kind of water body has. Most bass fishermen deploy a wide range of lures, but I usually stick to fishing a worm. Maybe even around sunset when I might use a topwater instead. Sometimes when I’m fishing a small pond, small lake, large lake, or reservoir, I throw a Senko, but when I’ve fished large ponds, I’ve fished only the slim Chompers worms that sink at half the speed. All of the ponds have brush in the water, so an inset hook is essential. The worm sinks slowly in the bass’s line of sight. Since the ponds allow me to stand, I take advantage of the element of stability. It’s not that I’d talk down the use of a squareback canoe on small lakes, but standing in relation to targets makes a difference. So does remaining still instead of moving slowly on the water under a breeze. Not to mention transmitted from the hull into the water. It never fails to appall me that some fishermen pay no heed to keeping the boat quiet. On large lakes and reservoirs, I sometimes fish a worm while standing in a boat, but a boat doesn’t ground the feet the way standing firmly on shore does. Also, the moving of brush out of the way, the scaling of steep banks, the maneuvering for position among trees and brush makes a difference, because added focus can reward you after the struggle. And, as I say, staying put squarely in a standing posture to exercise that focus emphasizes your relation to the target. No boat confers the same certainty.
Some of the time I don’t cast but pitch. Either way is an exercise in accuracy, pitching sometimes even more critical than when casting freely, because pitching involves a tight situation and the target space may be a couple of square inches. Even the way the worm enters the water—headfirst with a penetrating plunk is best—makes a difference. I don’t find it difficult to describe how to deliver a worm so it enters the water well, but it’s possible practice figures some of that out. You’ll understand what I mean when you find certain pitches complete themselves well, in ways not easy to describe, like the way it lands on a branch an inch from the surface and promptly rolls into the water almost silently. You’ll see hundreds of examples, if you’re good at pitching, and forget the exact specifics of each pitch.
The target space may be very small when casting, too, although you might have wider leeway either way. If you pay attention, you won’t allow much. Eyesight develops the more you practice. Not clarity per se, but of where exactly to cast or pitch, and the more you hit bullseyes, the more pleasure you feel, which involves a feedback loop. That’s how you can work for one or two bass without suffering much inertia. That’s important. I won’t say I haven’t felt any inertia, because sometimes an “ugh” breaks in, but by developing a rhythm of purpose, methodically working spots I get to know well over time, the infrequency of pick-ups never got boring.
I own a couple of rods I use for worming, but when I’ve fished ponds, I’ve used my five-and-a-half-foot, medium power St. Croix. Fifteen-pound-test Power Pro braid has always been enough to pull bass away from the sticks, and I do have to apply a little extra pressure at times. I wouldn’t use any line other than braid and no lesser strength. The short rod allows better casting accuracy than the seven-foot, medium-heavy Lew’s Speed Stick I enjoy using on lakes, and it would go without saying the shorter rod makes for easy maneuvering where trails are not well defined.
I caught this 19 5'/8” bass on a Rebel Pop-R before sunup.
Paradise Lost
It’s easy to think I never should have left that fishing behind, because you can tell by the descriptions of pitching in the sticks that I really had something I enjoyed. Something that required skill. And it was beautiful being alone with it. Some of my pond bass came on topwaters, too. And rather than the notion of my having fallen to temptation—namely the temptation of bigger and better in terms of boats and lates—I think I got out with time leftover, by which I mean I never stopped taking joy in that fishing, when it could have gone stale on me.
I get that notion of temptation and the loss of paradise. I suffered that when I left the Jersey Shore’s wild regions of inshore bays. I longed so deeply for those bays, you’d think it would have killed me long before I hit rock bottom. No, the interior of a man is not limited to the space of his body. And I longed repeatedly for Mount Hope Pond after I’d really let it go already, too. It seems like 2018 was two years ago, when my son, Matt, and I last fished Mount Hope’s sticks. But I moved on. Part of the reason Mount Hope felt so exciting when I did the fishing is because it remained new to me.
In 2011 or 2012, I encountered a fellow angler there who fished at the clearing along the dam. He complained of no bass, and I told him that by getting back in the brambles and casting to the brush in the water, he could catch a couple. He said he would do without the ticks and catch some in Florida. That might be the typical attitude, but if you give Jersey bass a try, you can catch some. You’ll find it’s plenty, if you give it an earnest effort.
Mount Hope existed as a grand symbol more than a decade ago. Beginning in 2011 or 2012. My journals might say which year exactly, but this sort of thing is so personal, I probably didn’t write about it. Personal in a way that seems silly to me, but really isn’t. It was personal in the sense that it depended on my addressing the place, Mount Hope, especially as marked on Interstate 80—the village, the place. I always imagined elevation. And the sign on Interstate 80 was high over the roadway. All of that involved me much more than writing any of it down. In fact, I can never write down certain things without defiling them. It’s better to be alert to that eventuality, rather than to commit it.
Some people, I’m one of them, have naturally occurring religious temperaments. It’s not the same as being a believer. (If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s critical intellect.) To my understanding, religiosity is a need and ability to create gods. Thus, Mount Hope was something I could worship as my own god, but by doing so, I made it something more than me. Such ability—such power—doesn’t necessarily last into one’s elder years. I remember reading the 20th century Jewish prophet, Martin Buber, decades ago, where he speaks of philosopher Immanuel Kant losing his spiritual powers as Kant reached his elder years.
It’s less important to have those powers, than it is to be ordinary. Never forget the lesson of King Alexander. He came to believe himself a god, but he would have been wise, instead, to remember the lessons he took from Aristotle and know that he would lose his friends that way. And besides, Alexander was a king, but as a king, he was only first among equals.
I’m puzzled right now, because Barack Obama was President in 2012 and ran on hope. I never once drew the connection. “Mount Hope” existed entirely as my creation, including all the pitching in the sticks, which reawakened my 17-year-old self and seemed to intimate that I had hope as the author of books. I don’t say the existence of “Mount Hope” as a symbol was entirely subjective. I don’t believe it was. But what happened—soon—was that Trump got elected.
How could there be any connection? No idea. I simply report that it presented itself to me, as I wrote this post, as if there is. It doesn’t matter, except that the creation of symbols will serve the good, these windows upon spiritual powers that undoubtedly do exist.
As I prepared this blog post, I tried to find that glorious symbol of Mount Hope and did not find it. It clearly no longer exists. It’s like the fishing spots I told you about more than a decade ago. That I fall in love with them … then let them go.
I move on.
And that’s the way I stay happy.