Schuylkill River and Penn's Landing

Monday, 6/11/2007 – Schuylkill River (downtown Philly)

For 10 years my connection to this fishing spot had been from one of the top floors of one of Philadelphia’s skyscrapers where I annually met with a colleague who loves to fish and who would point to this spot and say, “I’ve heard that people catch fish there.”

From up there this spot looks about as urban and paved and yucchy as possible. But down here at ground zero it’s not bad. It’s dawn and drizzly and I’ve walked down the hill from my public parking spot just outside the west entrance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The river stretches before me, a generous parade of fish splashing the surface. I stand on the grassy area just above the dam. This is sort of a platform and the river is five feet below. There’s a rail, but it’s easy to cast over. The river is gorgeous: I see shallows, rocks, underwater vegetation, currents and glides. And just upstream – within easy casting distance – are overhanging and fallen shoreline trees that are just perfect for bass. (The www.takemefishing.org Web site talks about this spot and says there are bass here.)

Last evening I came by to check out the parking and saw a dozen anglers – none with any fish – mostly using bait, not lures. But now it’s Monday morning and there are no other anglers. Cars whiz noisily to work on the across-the-river highway.

After a few fishless casts with a plastic worm into the underwater grasses just below where I stand I switch to a Pop-R, cast it as far as I can, and twitch it on the surface. When the strike happens, it is pitiful – not even a splash, just a disappearance of the topwater plug. I set the hook and it’s a good bass. My line is only 6-pound, and so I climb over the rail, lie on my belly on the wall, and reach down to lip the bass so the line won’t break while lifting him up onto the grassy platform. A couple of pounds – 14 inches, maybe a half inch more.

I look up towards the skyscraper in the distance; I know exactly which one it is. I wish my friend were watching with binoculars, but he’s out of town today.

I have only an hour, so I fish fast. No other bites on the Pop-R, so I switch to a Zoom fluke and catch another bass – this time a smallmouth. And it is small – maybe 9 inches.

I walk upstream along the wooded shoreline, onto a wooded peninsula that is carpeted with flotsam and mucky, muddy high-water stuff. This is an area of overhanging and overarching trees through which I twist and poke my rod and drop a big Senko into shoreline shadows. Nothing. I wish I had more time to give this a thorough going-over.

But I’ve done what I set out to do: get an up-close, line-wetting look at what has been a longtime Bali Hi.

Penn’s Landing (downtown Philly)

I have an hour between appointments and I’m parked right here in the huge lot on the Delaware, so I think why not. My favorite kind of water: urban, surrounded by city hum, folks hurrying by, and sort of nasty looking. At least compared to Yellowstone.

But where do you start on a spot like this? I guess you’d call this entire stretch a huge concrete wharf – perhaps a dozen feet above the river’s surface. No fishing platforms, a rail over which you sort of have to climb and lean in order to cast a line, and no stumps or overhanging trees or underwater weeds or gravel bars or anything at all that looks fishy.

Plus, the river is ripping quickly with an incoming tide. So no time for a lure to sink to the bottom – however far down that might be. But still, it’s water, and water means a fishing opportunity.

There are some pilings, and pilings create structure and they create eddies and that means a place to drop a soft plastic lure which I do. I like to look for largemouths whenever possible and thus the pilings strategy. Nothing. No bite, not even a “funny feel” that I can say might be a bite.

And then, a hundred yards down, I discover gold. A long rectangular “cove” – all concrete border of course – into which tugs and other boats come and dock and unload. Still the high rail, but un-currented water. A backwater! And that’s what you look for for bass in big rivers like this.

The water clarity is about an inch – alright, maybe a foot or two – and there is all sorts of stuff floating on top: paper products, logs and limbs, ropes, you name it. Stuff that the river gathers along its shorelines and then swirls into its backwaters. Stuff that provides cover and habit for fish! At least that’s always my thought.

I throw a Pop-R for three minutes (my business meeting is approaching) without a hit. Then I switch to a finesse worm with a sixteenth-ounce jig head and twitch it along the bottom. Within a couple of minutes I feel something funny that may have been a sluggish nudge from a bluegill or something.

Then I drop my plastic worm in the midst of a bunch of tightly-packed flotsam that is backed up into the corner of this inlet and let it sink to the bottom. (Golden Rule: bass often hang out beneath flotsam that’s backed into a corner.) On the second jiggle something hits and my rod bends it double and I am suddenly attached to a pretty good bass. It is a brief but fairly complicated struggle given that I am using only 6-pound line and the bass zigs and zags around various limbs and logs, but I finally work him out and up into my hand. He weighs a good two pounds, maybe more, and in spite of him having whiskers and no scales and spikes on top and on the sides, I’m definitely counting him as a bass. I take my photo – Philly’s big buildings in the background – and in spite of what the photo indicates, Janet says she’ll back me on it being a bass.

My bottom line is always the same: give me a few minutes and a chunk of water and I’m compelled to give it a try.

Another bottom line: even though I fished briefly at that parking area at Penn’s Landing, I saw no evidence that anyone else fishes there: no discarded line, no discarded tackle packages, not even one tiny smidgen of the stuff that disreputable anglers leave behind.