Lake Cochituate North (second visit)

Saturday, 6/9/2007 – Lake Cochituate’s North Pond (second visit)

It’s dawn and I’m back at the Cartop Boat Access to fish until the 8:00 a.m. gates open down the road at the State Park. No float tube this morning – just shoreline, this time in the other direction.

It’s misty and foggy and the opposite shore melts into grayness. The whole dawn universe is gray with a verdant border separating water from air. A bird-egg-blue canoe glides in the distance. A bullfrog greets me with four guttural blasts. A squirrel scampers up the oak in front of me and hides on the other side, his tail peaking out. A snapping sound announces another squirrel up above. Then a third.

I find some bass. There is a grassbed a long cast from shore and a first cast with my Pop-R produces a 15-incher. Then another one on a sinking, fluttering Senko. And a final one on another Senko. All in the 14/15-inch range.

Way out in the middle I see a fish jump – no, leap – clearly five feet out of the water. Silver and sleek, it looks like a Florida mullet.

Then in the other part of the lake – way, way, way out in the middle – I see lots of splashing. A school of marauding bass! The splashing slowly approaches my area of the lake and eventually I see elbows. It’s a swimmer – a freestyler going methodically from somewhere to somewhere smack in the middle of this huge lake.

The blue canoe passes him going the opposite direction.

When I depart the canoer is loading. “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” he offers. “I asked him if he’s okay, if he needs help, and he said he’s fine.” Neither of us knew the swimmer’s origin or destination.

The canoer also has an answer to my leaping fish: Atlantic salmon. They’re stocked in here and they jump just like that. One of his friends caught a 27-pounder! The http://www.takemefishing.org/ Web site is absolutely correct about their presence after all.