Lake Cochituate’s North Pond

Friday, 6/8/2007 – Lake Cochituate’s North Pond – west of Boston

I have just 90 minutes before sundown to wet my first ever line for Massachusetts bass in a lake I’ve never before seen but have recently discovered on the http://www.takemefishing.org/ Web site. The site says there are bass in here, and also Atlantic salmon which I assume is a mistake. The water is clear and deep and calm beneath a warm, cloudless sky, and so I start with a shad-colored suspending jerkbait that can be deadly in clear water.

The main gate to Cochituate State Park – just down the road – is already closed for the day when I arrive, but I find this “Cartop Boat Access” road and that’s where I am fishing. I see only one boat on the lake: a ski boat without skiers. Three shoreline anglers sit almost motionless in a row of canvas camp chairs a hundred yards down the shoreline.

Within minutes I am in my float tube and flippers. A throw-rug-size school of small fish dimple the surface a hundred yards out and I propel myself within casting distance. Nothing with the jerkbait. I switch to a finesse worm on a sixteenth-ounce head. Nothing. I count as I let it fall to the bottom – 50 feet.

I flipper my craft shoreward to a tiny cove next to the parking area and cast the worm to the periphery of a fallen tree. A good strike but no fish. Two more of the same.

I bite the worm in half – from six inches to three inches – re-hook the shortened version, and –promptly hook and land a leaping 14-inch largemouth. Purple-black markings on deep yellow-green body. The clearer the water the more defined the coloring.

A whole multi-hundred-acre lake on a June Friday afternoon near Boston, and my tube is now the only watercraft. A full palette of greens along the shorelines – no visible homes, just woods.

In a nearby tree I hear a bird that’s not from Virginia – a solo tweet like a brief tin flute. Again and again. A ground squirrel scoots along the shore, hops onto a log, poses, and scampers uphill.

Another 14-inche bass – identical coloring to the first – grabs the worm. So do three more before the sun sets.

In the back of the cove are weeds and I hear a deep-throated bullfrog bellowing among them. This place is too vacant for an after-work Friday – too close to Boston to be so vacant.

Another ground squirrel darts along, and further downshore a tree squirrel, three times as large, comes down to take a look.

I am throwing 6-pound line and I wish for a big bass or a big something else to grab the worm and scream the drag. But it doesn’t happen.

Back at the car as I deflate the tube another car pulls up and the driver gets out and photographs an orange-pink sun on the horizon nestled among evergreens and backlighting a gnarled stump in the foreground. I ask him if he’ll do me a favor and hand him my camera which I pose with tube and rod.

The nametag on the check-in lady at the motel says “Patt.” Two Ts. She says that three Pats work there and they have to be able to distinguish them so she gets the double Ts while the other two get Pat and Patty. Patt says she’s started using the double Ts by accident on other things including setting up her new home computer sign-on name yesterday. She says it with a smile.