Jamaica Pond

Saturday, 6/9/2007 - Jamaica Pond, Boston

A big urban circle surrounded by willows, sycamores, grass, joggers, walkers, chipmunks, and 7-figure homes and condos, this deep 68-acre body of water claims to be the oldest reservoir in the nation – long-ago provider for Boston’s residents. Today it’s a well-heeled urban duck pond. And it’s surrounded by shores that are indeed easy to fish from.

The www.takemefishing.org Web site says there are bass and trout and even salmon in this lake, but to tell the truth, it doesn’t look very fishy to me. Its shorelines are manicured and paved and accessible, and the nicely graveled path and benches that encircle the lake are peopled with a moving smorgasbord of strollers and runners, walkers and talkers, coffee drinkers and snack eaters. My first casts into the featureless near-shore waters with a 4-inch finesse worm are fishless.

My strategy is the same as with any new water: cover as much territory as possible as quickly as possible changing lures as often as possible in an effort to crack the code as soon as possible. So I walk quickly along the path pausing every so often to cast. A Pop-R, a Rat-L-Trap, a hard plastic jerkbait, even a Senko. Nuttin honey.

A couple of rowboats move slowly out in the middle. (There is a rental concession.) No fish jump or splash or dimple the surface anywhere on this smooth windless day. This appears to be a dishpan lake – shallow shorelines dropping off into a deep bowl in the middle. No shoreline fallen trees, no sandbars or gravel humps, nothing to which bass might relate.

And then I see it – underwater grass. One side of the lake is herniated into a sort of bulge. It’s obviously shallower than the rest of the lake because with my polarized lenses I can see grass beds. And there are diving, fish-eating waterfowl here – six of them scattered about – all diving and coming up and pointing their beaks towards the sky and shaking their heads.

I throw my finesse worm into a particularly thick weeded area and catch a fat bass – not quite 12 inches – but then no more strikes. I keep my eyes on the diving birds and finally see an actual fish in one’s beak. It’s not a bluegill as I had suspected, but a narrow minnow of some sort. So I tie on a Zoom fluke, fish it with a slow swimming motion, and I’m in business. I guess I catch a half-dozen bass or more in the little time I have left – two of them pushing 3 pounds – all among this weedy area of the lake. I get a walker to take my photo holding the largest. “Looks real to me,” was his comment.

I see 6 other anglers around the lake. None claims to have caught anything. Perhaps they’re fishing for trout. I walk the rest of the lake without any additional strikes – and without additional underwater grass.

An old gnarly man who could pass for homeless, but isn’t, passes me twice as he walks limping laps around the lake. The first time he greets me with, “Are you fishing or are you just practicing?” He doesn’t give me time to respond. “Like lawyers, they practice,” he concludes as he walks on with a smile.

An hour later he passes me again – after I’ve caught several bass – and says, “Where’re all your fish?” Again, no time for my response. “In your pocket? Ahhh, you’re a faker!” And he walks hurriedly on.