Access, or a lack of it, is one of the major reasons why fewer people are hunting today.
As property is posted or lost to development, it becomes tougher to simply find a place to hunt.
I’m experiencing a similar problem this summer, but I’m not losing land to hunt on, but rather open water to fish.
And it’s not the result of posted signs or development.
My favorite fishing spots are being lost to weeds.
After the peak of trout season concludes and the warm, summer months arrive, I turn my attention to bass.
Specifically, a handful of farm ponds that dot the rural landscape where Bradford, Sullivan and Wyoming counties meet. The area is bucolic, wild and, aside from a few farms and a couple of small towns, remote.
Best of all, the ponds are typically forgotten places where angling pressure is minimal. Flanked by looming mountains or farm fields, fishing for bass on the ponds is the perfect “get away from it all” remedy in the summer.
But on a recent trip to a couple of the ponds, I found that my angling paradise had become a nightmarish quagmire.
For years, the ponds contained plenty of open water surrounded by a shoreline full of cattails, bulrush and common reed. Logs, stumps and a few beaver huts provided the submerged woody structure that bass love, and pockets of lily pads provided a shady spot for the fish to pop at bugs during the midday heat.
But over the years, the ponds began to change.
Recently, I rowed my jonboat onto one of the ponds to a spot that was laden with dead trees and submerged stone walls – when the area was a field decades ago – anticipating the bass-haven that always existed.
Instead, the water was choked with Eurasian watermilfoil, established in dense mats that extended from the muddy bottom to the surface. The watermilfoil had consumed the pond, and the only places I could cast were narrow channels that the weed had yet to colonize.
The bass were still there, however, and they eagerly smacked a rubber worm. But as soon as a fish was hooked, it dove right into the watermilfoil, wrapping line through the thick weeds before becoming engulfed in an enormous, disgusting glob. Most of the time, as I reeled in the heavy mess and peeled away the weeds, the bass had already gotten away.
Discouraged, I rowed back and drove to another bass hotspot that I was sure would save the day.
It was even worse.
The pond is flanked by a lush, green mountain on one side, and a field and swamp on the other.
Yet the water in between was covered in lily pads, and not just the typical white-flower variety. Those I can tolerate, as the pads float flush to the surface, making it easy to wiggle a rubber worm across and into pockets of open water.
As the water became deeper, the surface was covered with yellow pond lily – the type with leaves (pads) that act as a barrier by extending above the surface. To make matters worse, the pads are heart-shaped, and it seemed like every retrieve of my line followed into the narrow opening that easily snagged a rubber worm on a weedless hook.
There were a few channels of open water that I could fish, and there were plenty of big bass to be pulled from the edges of the pads. But that didn’t make up for the habitat that was lost, as the lily pads covered the shoreline, surrounded an old beaver hut and created an impenetrable mat everywhere else. At times I felt foolish trying to cast a rubber worm on 8-pound test into pockets of open water between the pads that were smaller than a sheet of plywood.
Cut in half.
And cut once more.
Now, thanks to the watermilfoil and lily pads, a couple of ponds that used to take me an entire day to fish, took only a few hours. The places are just becoming impossible to fish.
And I’m afraid the weeds are here to stay, as they’ve survived and flourished despite years of fluctuating water levels and thick, winter ice.
I know what it’s like to lose a favorite hunting spot to land development, and losing a productive bass pond to invasive weeds is just as bad.
Sure, the fish are still there, but getting to them often feels like a futile effort as lily pads coat the surface and watermilfoil creates a stringy mess everywhere else.
And it’s a stark reminder that invasive plant species aren’t just an issue on land, but they’re a major nuisance in an aquatic environment as well.
