Maine Outdoor Journal

Once a couple of years ago when the Bro and I were fishing for smallmouths on the Andro in Durham, I cast my woolly bugger near a reedbed and began a retrieve. A small fish bit off more than he could chew -- it was a chub or a dace, maybe six or seven inches long -- and he was hooked. I stripped in the line, wanting to get him off the hook quickly, but when the struggling fish was almost to the boat, up from the depths came a bass and inhaled the little guy. I had them both on the line briefly, but the bass was not well hooked and in a few seconds he had gotten away with an easy meal. I was not at all surprised by the mugging -- after all, that’s what fishing with live bait will lead to, unintentional though it was on my part. I’ve had the same thing happen in saltwater. Two summers ago I was lobbing a large treble-hooked plug into a small, murky inlet of Huntington Bay, Long Island, when a bluefish took the lure, with a blue’s usual enthusiasm for the kill. As I was reeling him towards the boat, he suddenly got a lot stronger and heavier, and when I got him alongside I saw that he had company. Another blue, jealous of the first one’s catch of the shiny plug, had tried to take the lure away and gotten hooked as well. First time I ever caught two fish on the same lure on the same cast, though I’ve gotten mackerel in bunches on those umbrella rigs and caught trout and salmon on both flies when I was fishing a dropper.

Last week, fishing in fast water for landlocked salmon and brookies, a small salmon took the fly (I think it was a beadhead nymph) and was putting up a game fight for a fish that was maybe twelve inches in street shoes. I saw a flash beneath the salmon, and my rod doubled over as a much bigger fish, either a trout or a salmon, I couldn’t tell, grabbed the little salmon. As with the bass of earlier experience, the big fish was probably not hooked at all; the small fish had the fly and the big fish had the small fish, and after a couple of seconds the line went slack. (Honestly, Warden, I wasn’t bait fishing.) That was the first time that had happened to me in trout/salmon water, though I have seen bigger fish following a struggling, hooked fish. Then it happened again. Trout Boy (NHRN) and I were fishing the same water and I had a small salmon on. When I got him to within ten feet of the boat, what was maybe the biggest brook trout I have ever seen porpoised (an appropriate term -- he looked as big as a porpoise) just behind the hooked fish, but missed. I nearly dropped my rod at the sight of that fish.

Now, I have a theory. The Bro sort of snickered at this, but it may have some validity: catching a fish attracts other fish, that are drawn by the hooked fish’s struggles and the prospect of a free lunch. So a few weeks ago when the Bro’s pal was fishing on the pond and hauling in trout after trout while we, a few yards away, were getting skunked, maybe the guy was creating his own school of trout, drawn towards his boat by the thrashing of his first and succeeding catches. Plausible? I think so.