The Cottage Chronicles: Episode 14 - Losing Fish, Gaining Ground

Intro

Welcome to another episode of the Cottage Chronicles. It's been a minute.

My last episode left off right at the start of the trout fishing season I think I'd just caught a brown trout. I'm not sure I'd even gotten into any rainbow trout yet, and I was feeling pretty down.

I've been looking for an exciting fishing story to make up for the last couple of boring episodes, but I really delayed producing this episode.

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

I really can't think of a time when the phrase "imposter syndrome" resonated more with me than it did this spring. Sure I lack self-confidence, but I have a pretty keen sense of my weaknesses and limitations. I don't have a brick and mortar store, therefore I'm not really a local business. I don't fish in tournaments, therefore I'm just an amateur. There's not a lot of room for interpretation.

That type of thinking never struck me as a problem until I started running my business. I always downplay the effort that it takes to run the shop, to produce videos, to write the blog, and even to create this show.

Don't get me wrong, friends and family have been incredibly supportive, but there have been a lot of late nights that I've spent wondering what I can do to establish my brand. A long cold winter with no fish and no orders made me really stop and reconsider that phrase, "imposter syndrome."

I've caught just about every species in my local river. My biggest bass last year was the biggest one that I've seen in 20 years. But that's old news.

Fishing, for all its pageantry, has a funny way of keeping you humble. The river's the ultimate equalizer. The river doesn't care about your last PB or your next one. It just flows on.

With my new waders, my old glass rod, and a box of flies, I hit the river in late February. One skunk after another, I trudged along the bank, mapping new laydowns, cuts, and pools, each more promising than the next.

My fly fishing misadventures resulted in a fat brown trout and a couple of good rainbows in mid-March. The brown that I featured on the last show was a holdover. The rainbows came just after stocking. Collectively, they might represent the most productive spring trout season I've had since college.

What caught me off guard about all three catches is they came after just one or two casts in the area. Aside from one encounter with a perceptive bow that turned away from my lure at the last second, my casts were solid, my presentation was flawless, and my hook sets were deep.

By this point, I'd switched from flies to spinners and this is exactly why. If you can reel consistently and you can see a blade spin, you can catch fish on a spinner.

Pickerel Quest 2025

As April gave way to May, the weather warmed up again and the trout bites slowed once more. I missed the early-season lake trout bite again this year, so I turned my attention to the slower-moving streams and backwaters that formed the backdrop of most of my fishing stories last season. I began sweeping through all of my old haunts in hopes of finding a pickerel bite or any sign that the bass season had truly begun.

A storm front was rolling in from the west and a severe weather alert had just lit up my phone. My mom offered to babysit for a couple hours and the likelihood of another fishing trip happening that week was looking pretty bleak. So I did what any logical angler would do. I loaded up the kayak and faced the oncoming storm.

The cloud cover was light, and the water levels were high, so it seemed like as good a time as any to fish some of the laydowns that would be a lot harder to access later in the Summer. I figured the bite would be slow anyway, so I tied a jerkbait on one rod and a spinner on the other. Jerkbaits are a weak spot in my fishing game, and spinners are my ultimate confidence bait, so I figured this would be a good balance between the two.

I started by covering the pond and checking to see if any bass had taken refuge in the lilies yet. I missed one bass that struck at my jerkbait, but otherwise it went quiet other than a handful of bluegills that were munching at bugs on the surface. I alternated between throwing the jerkbait and the spinner, catching a few small bluegills before moving upstream.

After a brief detour by the frog ponds, I stopped by the pickerel weed for a few casts. There was no pickerel weed yet, but I thought there might be a willing pickerel who'd be interested in the flash of a spinner blade or even a small jerkbait presented to look like a perch.

No such luck, but there's a reason that I focused on perch-sized presentations. They are among the most common species in that part of the river, outnumbering even the bluegill. As it turns out, they also like jerkbaits. No surprise considering they like anything that'll fit inside their greedy little mouths. A couple perch later and I paddled on.

The next stop was only a few yards away. A well-aimed cast could cover the distance if I wanted to, but I chose to paddle a little bit closer and drift the rest of the way. At my bow, a tree blocked most of the river. It met with a low canopy on the other side of the river to form a complete tunnel.

I fished the canopy side for a few minutes before catching a small largemouth that was just barely bigger than the jerkbait. After that I turned my attention to the laydown which forms a cove with a nearby walnut tree. I took my first cast with a spinner and hooked up on a large pickerel that I lost right at the boat side. By my estimates it was about 20 inches. That's not the gator I'm looking for, but it was a respectable fish either way. It would have been a definite contender for PB if the line hadn't broken when I tried to lift it out of the water.

All pickerel have two things in common. They're strong and they're fearless. As soon as that fish hit the water, I switched to my other rod and followed up with the jerkbait.

Twitch, Twitch, pause. Twitch, Twitch, Twitch, pause. That's how they do it on YouTube, right?

There was no way that this jerk bait was diving deep enough to snag on the bottom. This second fish was not playing games. It surged forward, bending my rod and testing the limits of my 15-pound test braid. A gust shoved the kayak further into the cove Just for a second, I gave the fish some slack.

A third thing that's true about Pickerel is that they're fast. One second is all they need to turn the tide of the battle. Unfortunately for me, that's all it took for this fish to shake the hook.

I moved to a spot further upstream and hooked into a small bass and a pickerel that I measured at about 17 inches. By my estimate, the first fish that I dropped had at least 3 inches on him. The second fish never surfaced, but it was even bigger. It fought twice as hard and it swam three times as fast. I'm convinced it was at least 21 inches.

It's rare that I'm excited about dropping a fish. Unless my gear fails on me, it's really not the ideal outcome. But this was no ordinary fish. I've talked about my mental map before of all the spots in the river where I've caught and dropped memorable fish. Some I've caught and some have eluded me, but I know where all their hideouts are. While this isn't one of my go-to spots, it is on the map.

I dropped or broke off several big pickerel last year. I wrapped my fall season with a goal to catch the biggest one before 2025 is through. Getting that first good fish to boat side and dropping the second gator is all the sign I need to prove that the big one is still out there. I found it in a second- or third-choice spot, which means that prime real estate will be absolutely epic this season. This story has only just begun.

If you'd like to follow along with my pickerel quest or all my other fishing journeys, follow along on my YouTube channel. I finally started posting my fishing trips there.

The first video is out now and you can see the pickerel that I dropped as well as a smaller one that I landed that day.

Aside from the YouTube update, I've got another one that I'm pretty excited to share. I finally tested some of the swim baits that I was pouring earlier this spring, and the results have been promising. The fish struck on the very first cast, but I was using a jig head that was too small to actually set the hook. There wasn't any other action on that trip, but I did have another cool encounter.

Ghosts of Anglers Past

I love watching birds while I fish. I was fishing from a cove that's frequented by ospreys, herons, even bald eagles. I recognize each of them by their calls, and I recognize the calls of the red-tailed hawks and many of the smaller songbirds in my area. I can't identify every call, but I'm getting better at it.

As the sky darkened and the first sheets of rain came over the pond, I heard a new sound. It was actually an old familiar one, but it was out of place. What I mean is the sound itself was comforting, but the context was totally new.

I don't talk that much about my scouting days anymore. That was a major part of my childhood. We'd go on camping trips about once a month and do an overnight summer camp once a year. Campgrounds were typically affiliated with our council or neighboring one, and they were almost always lakefront properties in New Hampshire. The dream!

Every day at summer camp was filled with songs and chants. And at the end of the day, lights out was signaled by the bugle. Inside the muggy canvas tents, atop an old cot draped by bug netting, I listened to the last sizzling remnants of the campfire, and not the sounds of power boats or feral cub scouts away from their parents for the week, but the sounds of the lake's true year-round residents.

Scouts, especially at summer camp, love two things, water and knots, and boating combines the two of those things perfectly. So, naturally the scout camps had boats. Cub Scouts got paddle boats, and Boy Scouts graduated to row boats, canoes, and sailboats.

Regardless of the vessel, one thing was always drilled into our heads. If you see them on the lake, stay away from the loons.

The loons, were the stuff of legends. Like the ghosts who haunted the campsites in the wee hours of the morning, or the red efts on the scavenger hunt list, I don't think we ever actually saw them. I suppose there was some bird nerd pacing the bank with a pair of binoculars who might have scoped 'em out. If he was there, I never saw that guy either.

Yet the loons were different. It was their songs amplified by the quiet of the lake at night that filled the green canvas tent as I lie awake in the muggy summer heat. It was their midday trumpeting that caused us boys to stop in our tracks, cackling with laughter as if the dining hall chow had claimed another victim.

As the thunder rumbled and the storm closed in, it was this same sound that found me huddled under a pine tree, scrambling through my pack and looking for another spool of mono.

The pond continues to amaze me. It was along the same banks that I saw five bald eagles last spring. It was the same area where I first spotted osprey on my local river, and the same area where I battled pickerel as big as the dragons that you'd see at a Chinese New Year parade.

The pond is home. The pond is 20 years of honing my trout fishing expertise and griping about the weeds that form in the late summer. It's watching the bluegill's bed and watching the algae form. The pond is a heron flying overhead at the same time every day, returning home to his kids after a long work day, the same way that I do. It's reliably unreliable, flooding in the spring and drying out with the summer drought. It's my collection of secret spots and it's my small suburban oasis.

I've seen the loons at the reservoir. It surprised me to see them this far south, but it made sense. It's a place that's known for its clear cold water and its small mouth bass fishery.

Hearing them at the pond was a lot more surreal. I wrote it off at first. Like the loons at summer camp, I heard them but never actually saw them.

The next day my wife pointed out a post on a local Facebook group. Across town, at another favorite spot someone had spotted a loon

I've got a few close friends with whom I like to reminisce about days gone by, but otherwise I'm not that sentimental about people or about social settings. Maybe my particular social style makes it easier to block out certain conversations, but I find it lot easier to place myself back into a feeling or into a setting. For one reason or another, I dwell more on travels and experiences.

I really don't remember any of the specifics of camp. I couldn't tell you who my bunkmate was or what my favorite meal was at the dining hall. I do remember the loons.

It's unlikely that I'll return to the camps or the lakes of my youth. If my son wants to be a scout, I'll be all in. But that's neither a goal nor a plan of mine. I don't know if the loons are one or many. I don't know if they're still around or if they'll return. But that's the beauty of it.

The loons represent the part of nature that's still wild. They're the lake spirits, the souls of anglers past. Like the fog before sunrise, they'll disappear before you even know that they were there.

These are the kind of thoughts that bring me contentment these days. It's a feeling I chase more and more.

The past year or two have made me really reconsider when enough is enough and what it is that truly fulfills me. Grind culture and the corporate ladder climb, will never bring me the same satisfaction that watching the birds with my son will.

I have a good friend whose son is a little bit older than mine, and she shared a powerful thought with me just after he was born. She said that the first year is just about survival mode. and about 17 months on, that still rings true.

Sure, I didn't need to start a business or adopt a dog right after my son was born, but my priorities wouldn't have been any different. I've found that it's all about balancing my expectations with the amount of time that I have to commit to them. I often feel like I can achieve perfection after I start something new if I just commit enough time to it.

Experience has shown me otherwise, and rather than taking an adequate amount of time to fix my mistakes and to learn from them, I'm more inclined to power through, and sometimes this means just accepting mediocrity.

I guess I've always equated success with perfection. But what if it doesn't have to be that way? What I'm suggesting is that I'm going to try to take more time to appreciate the small victories along the way.

I don't know if I'll ever have a cottage of my own, but maybe that's okay if I find the joy in weekend trips to Lake Champlain or fishing new lakes and rivers out in New York, traveling around New England. I'm pretty sure I can find time to chase bluefin tuna, roosterfish, or even arapaima if I so desire. But finding the joy in those small moments in between is worth so much more than that trophy fish ever will be.

My trout season was a short one, but I'm thrilled with the size and quality of fish that I landed.I really didn't get any better at picking flies. I've got a pretty good feel for how far I can cast them. My side arm and back cast have improved. I feel a lot more confident casting on the spinning rod too. Much as I hate to say it, I've even come to appreciate Braid for throwing bigger baits like jerkbaits.

I still have to convince myself that I'm more than just an average angler. I struggle a lot with feelings of inadequacy. When my business goes months without a sale, it hurts. However, I can outfish just about anybody else on my home waters, and I can show you how. I can tell you which fish are on each and every cove, every bed and every laydown on the eastern side of my favorite bass pond. I can show you where the bottom transitions from sand to rock and back. I know where the thickest lily pads grow in the peak of the summertime. I take great pride in that.

My favorite phrase lately has been "onward and upward." So it's onward and upward for me, and the same for New Dawn Tackle Co.

I've actually had a pretty good season fishing since I started writing this episode. It's part of the reason it's taken so long to produce, because I've gradually come out of a funk, and I've actually had some pretty epic catches.

The Drum Beat of Victory

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in New York with my wife. We went to a cabin that my dad and my brother had stayed at last year and recommended. It was where my dad caught his first smallmouth, same weekend that I caught mine. I featured that on another show last year. we decided to check out the cabin for ourselves and check out this section of river that I thought was gonna be an awesome smallmouth fishery.

There was an island, there were some coves, all kinds of varied terrain, a big enough river for like 20 and 30 foot power boats to come through. It was a lot different than the fishing I do back home. the weather that weekend was absolutely pouring. I could not catch a break. So I decided to just take a kayak out and get in whatever fishing I could. I fished around the island. I fished around a cove. I was just getting skunked for two days straight.

The first night, I had an experience in one of the coves that really kept me going. I was casting through some thick stem plants, not really having any bites, not seeing anything. When I started hearing these giant splashes of water, almost like a beaver's tail. And when I turned around, I saw a huge fish leaping through the air. I think it was going after small frogs, but I never was able to confirm.

I paddled over and just allowed the boat to drift. I saw this silvery dorsal fin, three yards out from the boat. I thought the vish was going to take off, but I just skidded right over it. I could feel the hull of the boat scraping on the scaly back of this fish. It was a good size fish. If it was a bass, it would have been an absolute monster. At least a seven pound fish. I saw a couple of other fish leaping further out, but in a few minutes it went totally quiet and I called it a night.

The next morning I caught another break in the rain and I paddled back to that cove as fast as I could. I got back there with some bigger baits, brought some top water stuff with me. As long as there was no lightning, as long as there was no tornado, I was staying in that cove and I was gonna try to get a fish. I went further into the river. I crossed the channel. I went to the pond that was beyond that front cove and I caught nothing other than weeds.

I went back to the island. I dropped a small mouth there. It fell off right at my boat side, just close enough for me to tell what it was. And then it went quiet again. I tried every lure that I could. I tried every structure that I could. I was having no luck at all.

I decided I'd go But I would take a few casts on the way. I'd already pretty much given up on spinners, totally called it a day with the jerkbait. I was getting pretty sick of throwing plastics. So I decided to throw on a crankbait. This is a lure that I never throw. I'd never caught a fish on it before. I was just making a Hail Mary. I bombed that lure as far as I could parallel to the bank and I burned it back as fast as the reel would let me.

A few yards out from the boat, I felt the bill of the crankbait bump off of something, so I let up a little bit. I gave it a second, I started reeling again, and I felt this weight. I could still feel whatever it was coming towards me, but there was so much drag. Not something peeling drag off of the reel, but something just creating resistance in the water.

It felt almost like I had a big turtle on the other end of the rod. I hadn't seen any turtles other than some small painteds back in the cove. But this one felt like it would have been a giant snapping turtle. So I continued to reel in until I saw this same silver color from the dorsal ridge that I'd skidded over the night before. It was a giant fish. but I thought maybe it was a carp. As soon as it got to the surface, I went to look for my net or lip grippers, anything to grab it with, and it took back off.

I reeled the fish in once again, and then I saw this round, goofy mouth on the bottom of the head, these big, googly eyes, and it was unmistakably a freshwater drum. I brought it into the kayak, and took a measurement. It was a 25 inch fish. That puts it at about seven or eight pounds. In hindsight, it had to be what I skidded over the night before.

The drums must have been feeding in that cove. They're just big, slow-moving, awkward fish. I guess they had no reason to fear the kayak. And I don't even really know if I snagged this one or if it was a real catch. The lure was perfectly centered in its palate. It wasn't snagged on the side of the fish or anything. But it kind of blew my mind. It was the biggest freshwater fish that I've ever caught, and not to mention it was the first fish that I've ever caught on a crankbait.

It's continuously amazing to me how just fishing an extra hour, putting in an extra day, an extra little time on the water, or tweaking one little thing can result in the most amazing fishing trip. And just when you think you've got it all figured out, you can be totally caught off-guard.

I still cannot get over the fact that I caught this fish. It made my entire weekend. This is going to be the fish that I'm talking about all season. I don't care that it's not really a trophy fish. It's a seven pound fish. Sure, I could go to the Merrimack River and get into a big carp or big pike. But I'm not sure I'm going to catch a freshwater fish anywhere close to seven pounds.

I've made a couple more trips out this week. It's been another rainy week with lot of thunderstorms, fallen trees, swollen river. The works.

I spent about half an hour fishing on Saturday, got into a nice fat brown trout that measured about 15 inches. I did not expect them to be around this late in the year and not at all near the spot where I caught one. the following day I spent a couple hours out. I got some small pickerel, a couple perch. The first pickerel was right at the same spot as that trout, and I dropped a fish that had a dark, dark back. It was in an area where I usually catch pickerel. So I think it was a third pickerel.

It wasn't a spectacular day fishing, but I've definitely had lot worse days for only spending a couple hours out there. especially from the bank. I'm pretty happy with it.

I guess this is obvious by this point in the show, but it was a good reminder to me. It doesn't matter if you're good or bad at fishing. It doesn't matter if you've got the right lure or not, if there's nothing there to take it.

Maybe that's the case for my business too. Maybe I just haven't found where my customers are or who my customers are. But it's nice to have a little win once in a while.

There's always another day. There's always another weather pattern, another condition, another water level. It might not be that you have a bad spot. You might just not be fishing where the fish are. Be persistent. Put in the hours. It'll pay off.

Outtro

That's all I've got for this show. Thanks for tuning in. If you're not already, follow along on YouTube or Spotify and check out New Dawn Tackle Co. on all my socials. I'm on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky and Reddit. If you want to support the show, drop a comment, leave a review, pick up some fishing gear. Grab a hat or a beanie.

Thanks for your support. It means the world to me. I hope to catch you again on the next episode. Till then, tight lines and happy