The Challenge of Big Water: Fly Fishing Kentucky's Lake Cumberland

For the second straight summer, my family spent part of July at Kentucky's Lake Cumberland. One of the largest lakes in the country, Cumberland contains over 1,000 miles of shoreline, beautifully cascading waterfalls, unlimited geological wonders, and state record catches of walleye, sturgeon, and striped bass (otherwise known as rockfish to my Chesapeake Bay-based readers). The lake's size and diverse fish species create a significant dilemma for fly fishers: how do you fish a body of water that big, with that many different kinds of fish, with the rod-and-fly?

As many of you know, I routinely seek out small, often unrecorded, wild trout fisheries. I'm a voracious reader of maps, an undeterred seeker of local knowledge, and a mildly-obsessed internet scavenger. Wherever wild trout live, I trek. Indeed, my love of wild trout extends back to my childhood, when I would ride my bike to a tiny Pennsylvanian trout stream, and fish for small native brookies. But I also cut my fishing teeth on lake water, taking in yellow perch, chain pickerel, largemouth bass, crappie, and bullhead catfish on worms, minnows, Rapalas, Jitterbugs, and plastics. In many ways, then, I'm a lake fisherman by birth (if not necessarily by creed or practice). Nevertheless, I always end up stymied by the immensity of lakes and their surprising (at least to me) diversity.

See, when I think about bodies of water, I usually employ an arbitrary - and admittedly false - binary. That is, I think of rivers/streams/creeks as dynamic, always-changing ecosystems, while at the same time consigning reservoirs/lakes/ponds to the realm of static, stagnant fisheries. Embedded in this binary is an inescapable, and unfortunate, bias. I confess, I enjoy rivers more than lakes; I'd rather fish a mountain trout stream than a massive Kentuckian reservoir. Lakes, however, are constantly in a state of flux: weather conditions, temperature, and moon phases wreak havoc on lake fishermen's best-laid plans, and they make lake fishing a fun and unpredictable enterprise. Because I prefer northeastern mountain streams, then, does not mean that these waterways are intrinsically better than big southern lakes; instead, my preferences are underscored by personal, empirical, experiential moments. They are not right, and they are not wrong. They merely are.

Leaving my fishing preferences aside, I exhaustively fished Lake Cumberland during the past week. Not all of this fishing included flies. In fact, my two sisters and I turned to nightcrawlers, red worms, and captured minnows for bait. I don't love plunking, but I do love catching big catfish and panfish (true to form, we pan-seared some white perch and bluegill in lime juice, butter, and red-pepper flakes).

I did, though, rig up my fly rod. My strategies included locating rises in enclosed, cove-like areas of the reservoir (lake fish eat as many, if not more, insects than their river counterparts), slowly-working large popper flies along the shoreline, and floating tandems of nymphs and dries. With the right equipment and knowledge, lake fishing can be a fly fisherman's paradise. I encourage you to head to your local lake, and see what kind of fish you can land on the fly. I promise it'll be worth it.

Image #1: A Lake Cumberland waterfall.
Image #2: One of my bigger catfish.

Ice Fishing New Jersey's Lower Blue Mountain Lake

Yesterday, I traveled 150 miles to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, where I ice fished New Jersey's Lower Blue Mountain Lake. I had been dreaming of hard-water fishing ever since the cold spells of late November, but a recent warming trend in the northeast delayed my first trip until the beginning of January. I chose Lower Blue Mountain Lake because it sits above 1000 feet, and the extra elevation helps create a little more ice underfoot. Lower Blue Mountain, though, is an isolated public lake that requires deft navigation and a bit of hiking. To my surprise, I had the lake to myself. Think about that for a second: in the middle of ice fishing season, I was alone on a body of water in the nation's most densely-populated state.

While I sat on an island-based rock ledge overlooking my equipment, I attempted to come up with encomiums worthy of this place. And I kept failing. I tried to write in my head, which inevitably led me to start thinking about writing itself (such are the pitfalls of my profession). In particular, I thought about the act of writing about nature - perhaps the most basic of any type of writing. Words and concepts like inspiration, hermeneutics, beauty, alienation, and sublime floated through my head, while the birds sang above, and the fish swam below. I concluded that it is remarkably easy to write about the outside world, with its overwhelming combinations (a brightly-colored blue jay in a barren shagbark hickory tree), and otherworldly constructions (wind-swept wisps of snow blowing on the frozen lake like ghost-snakes). Just look at this blog and others like it: I write about nature and my participation within it, and people I've never met read the post, comment on my writing, and email me. In a sense, the moment I put these words on the page, I become united with readers who encounter or seek the same experiences. And no paragraph or sentence, no poem or novel, no blog-post or article, can convey the way I felt yesterday at Blue Mountain Lake. I'm simply not that good of a writer.

At one point, I focused on the silence surrounding me. I knew I was the only human within miles; I had no cell phone reception, and I didn't bring any other media with me. But then, an airplane would fly over-head, and I would hear its powerful engines echoing off the ridges. Or, I would hear the distant rumble of an ATV or the crack of a rifle, as hunters pursued their quarries. Man-made sounds like these pierced the quiet, and these eruptions showed me that the lake wasn't silent at all. In fact, it was a cacophony: roaring wind, singing jays/cardinals/juncos/flickers, hammering woodpeckers searching for food within the bark of wintered trees, and the thickening, expanding, and separating of the ice. And there I was, all alone at the top of the mountain. I may have caught six fish (three yellow perch, two largemouth bass, and one chain pickerel), but I still would have been endlessly happy if I had caught none.