Welcome back to another episode of The Cottage Chronicles! I'm your host, Neil Colicchio, founder of New Dawn Tackle Co., and I'm thrilled to have you all here as I celebrate a special milestone: New Dawn Tackle Co. has officially been up and running for six months! I received my DBA on February 5th, exactly a week before my 34th birthday. It's been an incredible journey since then, and I couldn't have done it without your support.
The theme of this episode will revolve around gratitude. I'm grateful for the friends and family who've encouraged me, asked me what I'm up to, and those who've simply followed along to drop a like or a comment now and then. I'm grateful that my son is growing into a healthy, happy, and active baby. I'm grateful for the many reminders from fellow parents to stop and appreciate the journey and for the supportive network of parents around me. And I'm grateful that despite COVID, norovirus, and miscellaneous daycare germs putting us through the wringer this year, my family is healthy and thriving.
I'd like to start this episode with a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately. I grew up with the birth of social media and the smartphone, but it's hard to remember a time when I didn't have 24/7 access to the best and most curated versions of people's lives. While I'm not entirely convinced that social media is the only reason people become jaded, burned out, or apathetic, I think it's an easy trap to fall into.
Over the past couple of months, work has kept me busy. I've swapped most of the fishing tales for how-to posts on the blog and top 5s on the podcast. I've continued to fish all along, but I haven't written any new long-form content. I just posted pictures to Facebook and Instagram each time I went out.
Fortunately for me, most of my trips were successful. The number of skunks grew smaller, and the size and quantity of bass grew more significant. I started the season with skunk after skunk before I really committed to scouting new locations and testing out additional lure colors. I landed my PB yellow perch and a few good pickerel during a phenomenal pre-span bass season. I also dropped a few beautiful fish, including a crappie that I'd been longing to catch. Last month, I redeemed myself with a monster crappie, and I fished new sections of the river, which began to deliver bites on every trip. I started experimenting with Ned rigs, and I even started choosing those over spoons and inline spinners.
I reached outside my comfort zone, fished unfamiliar spots and techniques, and made a mental catalog of each bite. Much of my spring and early summer fishing felt like I was living in this curated social media version of reality. Things were going so perfectly that it took a remarkably average trip with my friend Mike to bring me back to reality.
Mike is a college buddy of mine and one of the people close to my age who is considering getting into fishing as an adult. We went fishing once a few years ago, but he's been taking more interest in my fishing adventures since I started New Dawn Tackle Co.
After a lot of texting back and forth, some of which inspired my beginner guides, we made a plan to grab lunch, test out some gear, and see what Mike might enjoy most in his first rod and reel.
We started with a quick lunch at Five Guys, which has been sort of a tradition every time we've met up since the college days. After that, Mike was excited to show me a popular lake in the town where he grew up. We drove a few minutes through a charming southern New Hampshire suburb to find that the parking lot was full. Undeterred, we went to Mike's backup spot - a small town park with a smaller stretch of riverfront access.
We ended up in a dirt lot adjacent to a two-lane overpass. At the far side of the lot, parallel to the overpass, we scrambled down a rocky hillside to reach the water's edge. Once we made it down the hill, we found ourselves at a shallow section of river that passed beneath the road and opened into a small pool beyond. Below the overpass, we saw rusted-out car parts, remnants of other anglers' lures and lines, and a couple of schools of small sunfish darting about.
I took a test cast to see how snaggy it was before setting up my old two-piece rod with a small inline spinner for Mike. I gave him a brief explanation of how to reel in an inline spinner, then let him try his luck. Things were going smoothly until I heard a faint swishing noise behind me and turned to see my friend swinging the rod in different positions, determined to free his stuck lure from a submerged stump.
Overconfident from my recent fishing successes and eager to show my buddy how it's done, I offered to grab the rod from Mike and attempted to retrieve the stuck lure - or at least to snap it free. After a few unproductive shakes, I resorted to pulling the line straight back and attempting to snap off as short a section as I could.
What I didn't consider was that I'd been fishing a one-piece rod all season and most of last year. Aside from checking that the guides were aligned, I hadn't checked how tightly the rod was pressed together before handing it over to my novice friend. What I soon discovered was that our collective rattling attempts shook loose the upper half of the rod. I found this out as I snapped the line from the lure, then watched in disbelief when the top section of the rod slid off the now-loose line and floated down the river.
I paced along the bank, dismayed, looking downstream for any signs of a rod sticking above the water's surface. Realizing quickly that that would be a waste of time, I remembered that I still had two other rods and reels with me. Mike was still hanging out and fishing with one rod, so I took a deep breath and grabbed the other along with a tiny spinner to ensure that I'd stay high in the water column.
A few casts later, I had a fish - the first and only one that either of us would land that day. It was a pumpkinseed only a little bigger than the seed of an actual gourd. Despite my genuine excitement that I'd felt such a small bite and landed the fish and my astonishment that such a small fish would take a pass at a lure that size, I felt a deep sense of disappointment.
This, more than the rod incident, is what forced me to take a serious pause. For me, to be unexcited about a fish (even a dink) is entirely out of character. The fact that I felt anything other than elation at catching a fish, especially something novel like my PB, the smallest fish ever, was a huge red flag.
I paced around for another minute, looked up and down the river for other access points, and then watched Mike fish for a bit. I saw that he hadn't caught anything, so I swapped rods with him again to give him the setup that had just caught the pumpkinseed. Right away, he commented on the different experience retrieving this spinner vs. the larger one that I'd tied onto the rod he was using.
I took the other intact rod, walked back to my pumpkinseed spot, and made another cast upstream. I think, at this point, I was using my new ultralight rod. It's a 5-footer as opposed to my usual 6' 6, and it's an ultralight compared to a medium heavy. This trip was supposed to be my first time using the rod, but the mishap with the 2-piece rod meant that I randomly handed off one rod to Mike and hung onto the other one. When one of us snagged or snapped off, I'd switch or pause to tie on something new.
The short, wobbly rod sent my lure traveling with roughly twice the momentum I intended. It bounced off the overpass with a high-pitched clink, like I was playing a game of quarters with treble hooks and impossibly large shot glasses. The comically fast projectile spinner was enough to put a smile on my face, and it made me realize that my new rod was capable of something entirely different than my older setup. It filled me with a sense of excitement about what other small lures I could cast and how far, as well as a sense of wonder about how this ultra-flexible rod would stand up to a big bass or trout.
It was then that I began to see the humor in that trip - in my childish reaction to the small fish, the improbable two-piece incident, and the overpowered cast. I wanted to show Mike a fishing experience that only I could deliver and to put him on some fish. I hoped I'd stoke the fire of a lifelong fishing passion. Instead, I wound up with something different and something that took a while longer to appreciate.
The day after my adventure with Mike, my wife and I checked out a small creek closer to home. This time, I climbed down a sandy hillside to reach a shallow pool just downstream from an old railroad bridge. Following my success with ultralight inline spinners at the overpass, I decided to test the same lure at this new spot. Once again, I caught some small sunfish while throwing a size 0 spinner. After a particularly long cast landed at the base of the railroad bridge, I hooked into another unusual catch - the smallest chain pickerel I've ever caught.
One of the things I love most about throwing small metal lures is that I've got an equal chance of hooking a sunfish, a trout, or a pickerel. Of the three, the pickerel is the one that usually surprises me the most. Pickerel are up there with native brookies on the list of river fish that I respect the most. They're always lurking and ready to strike when I least expect it. Regardless of their size or when you encounter them, every pickerel strikes with intent. They treat every bite like a life-or-death battle. I've never met a pickerel that holds back like, for instance, a hatchery trout in early spring or a largemouth in the depths of summer.
Later that week, I saw a social media post that jumped out at me immediately. An angler I follow had posted a picture of a microfish with a caption about needing a bigger net. The comment section blew up with people laughing and making similar sarcastic remarks. It was cool to see so many people reacting to this post and talking about fishing, but something about it bugged me. I made a comment on the post that went something along the lines of "Any fish can be a PB depending on your metric for success. It's an unconventional best, but quite a feat to sense that small of a bite and come equipped with the right tackle to land it."
This was really what helped me re-evaluate my own trips, especially the one with Mike. In the end, I got to spend a day with my friend, and I pulled a fish out of an area where we weren't sure there was any life at all. I hope I left Mike feeling reassured that he picked an ok fishing spot. I know I demonstrated that everybody who fishes can have a bad day. Most of all, I showed him and myself that not every catch is a giant and that any fish can be a PB, depending on your metric for success.
I'm happy to say that I've continued to fish with the ultralight rod, have started catching some normal-sized fish again, and I'm looking for more tiny lures to make the next pumpkinseed battle one to remember.
Speaking of bigger fish, I've recently started fishing a section of river that is loaded with bass. Recently, I headed there with a couple dozen nightcrawlers as an insurance policy against rising summer temperatures. I caught a couple of largemouths so small that I decided I'd be better off targeting big sunfish than small bass.
After catching a hefty pumpkinseed and a few respectable bluegills, I decided to try for one more bass. I'd caught the last one after seeing a group of three juveniles swim by and throwing a Z-Man Finesse TRD just ahead of them. I'd been fishing with the goby bryant color, but I really wanted to try out firecraw based on all the success I'd had with TRD CrawZ in their green pumpkin orange color. I figured the edge of the lilypads where I'd been catching all these sunfish would be the perfect spot to test.
The bed was growing in a channel with the road on one side and an island on the other. I paddled to the side closest to the road, parallel to the edge of the pads, and tucked just out of the current of the main river. I cast to a point straight across, just where the tip of the island jutted out to form a bend in the river. Then I bounced my Ned rig just outside the pads.
After a few bounces, I felt something big rush my lure and try to take it into the pads. I reeled through the stems, doing my best to keep constant pressure without getting too balled up. When it was a couple feet out, I saw a large green side and still thought I had a bucket mouth on the line. It only made sense for it to be a largemouth. I'd seen bass, I'd caught bass, and I was targetting bass.
As I pulled the fish up and through the lilypads, I saw a pickerel that could very well have been the offspring of the monster that chased my bluegill in episode 3 of the podcast. This time, I had him hooked well, but he snapped the line as I tried to flip him into the boat. My Ned jig head, stick worm, and that monster pickerel returned to the river with a cleaner entry than any medalist at the summer games.
I doubt whether my epiphany about appreciating the bite or my time on the water played much of a role, but I was elated at this point. As I see it, the cost to tangle with what could be the biggest fish in that channel was simply a jighead and a stick worm. I wish I'd got a measurement or a picture, but I came away from that experience with something different. Knowledge and validation -- I formed a more complete mental map of this section of the river, and I was able to validate a gut feeling that I had that there were fish just outside the pads.
I've been cataloging these spots in my head (more on that in a moment), but this wasn't the end of my latest river trip. After the pickerel, I hit the pads with a small inline spinner and some nightcrawlers. Fishing with a bobber and worm and targetting bluegills around their summer nesting sites was an incredible experience that took me back to my childhood, fishing at the cottage. It reminded me of how far I've come as an angler and how different my relationship with fishing is now. It was intentional, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did.
With respect to my growth as an angler and the spots I've been exploring, I have been fishing the same geographic radius this year that I had been for the past 3 or 4 seasons. Starting last summer, I made it my mission to explore the river in all seasons and all weather. To whatever extent possible, I've tried to fish as many of my usual spots in as many seasons as I can. In the meantime, I've fished further along the banks, deeper into covers and channels, and covered more areas than ever before.
This has led me to bigger bites, more reliable spots, and some truly epic misses. Those almosts that I talked about in episode 3 continue to pile up, so I'm studying each one and committing as many details to memory as I can. I haven't been meticulous about studying the weather or lighting, but I've been memorizing the spots and returning to them on subsequent trips.
I've got the fallen tree where I dropped a pickerel in June, the pads where I dropped this pickerel, the submerged log where I caught a crappie in July, the overhang where a bass inhaled my stickworm while my line was caught in a branch, and the point where I caught the hardest-fighting largemouth of the season. All of these are accessible from just one launch. At another local spot, I have the grass bed where bass were spawning last year, the pads where I saw a football-sized bass the summer before, and the cove where I've caught pickerel deep into the winter when the water remains thawed.
So, this is where my head is now. I'm planning to do more exploring when the water cools a bit and the fish are covering larger areas. I also want to try some different spots during the fall trout season, as spring trout were a bust this year. While the weather remains hot, I'll double down on fishing this smaller handful of spots to improve my presentation and get a better sense of what features are holding fish under various conditions.
This approach has already paid off, with my PB largemouth bass caught a few yards beyond where I dropped the pickerel a week before. I'd been fishing the lilypads again, throwing a Ned-rigged stick worm, the same color that got the pickerel's attention last time, when I decided to paddle slightly further into the cove. As I drifted past the deepest water, I approached a couple of fallen trees that spanned the river - one from the road and one from the island.
Sun-baked and ready to ditch the cove for the current, I took a long cast over both trees and landed deep in a mix of pickerel grass and lilypads. I popped the Ned rig a couple of times before it snagged on something that felt like a stump. As I looked down to locate and dislodge my hook, a fish rose an inch below the surface and doubled back to the submerged tree. I could tell it was a giant, and it looked too round to be a pickerel. I was convinced I'd hooked a carp or a pike, maybe even a snapping turtle.
After pulling it over the tree and struggling to get a net anywhere under the fish without snapping the line or popping the hook, I landed the fattest largemouth bass I've ever seen in person. I only started seeing pictures of bass like this in MA after following some Quabbin Reservoir anglers on social media. I did not think that largemouths this big were this far east in the state.
I used the lip gripper to get the fish out of the net because I was afraid that a quick jaw snap would send a Ned head halfway into my thumb. A few pictures and a safe release later, I was shaking. The last time I caught a freshwater fish like this was close to 30 years ago when I landed another bass while fishing with my dad. I've always thought that bass was a once-in-a-lifetime catch, but I'm pretty sure the latest bass dwarfed that one.
I'm grateful for the fish I've caught and the ones I've dropped. I'm grateful that I've been able to spend a lot of time on the water this summer, and I'm especially grateful that I was able to get out last year and earlier this season to scout some new spots.
I've mentioned it before, but it's worth repeating: I want this podcast to help me communicate thoughts and stories to my son that I sometimes struggle to share in person. It's not that I don't want to share them, but sometimes it's hard to gather my thoughts and present them cohesively when speaking, unlike when I can do so on a recording. I'm trying hard not to come across as preachy or self-congratulatory.
Another goal with this show and with my blog is to keep track of my growth as an angler and as a business owner. My shop hasn't taken off the way I'd like it to; I'm not remarkably talented at producing engaging or meme-worthy content. Getting out on the water and catching fish with the products that I'm selling and the techniques that I'm writing about have reassured me that I am getting better at this - or at least that I'm moving in the right direction. I'm convinced that I'll find the voice of my brand and that I'll find the community that wants me to be part of their fishing journey - people who want to be part of my journey as well.
What I've struggled with is a relatively limited vocabulary around lures, techniques, and technical fishing. It's no accident that I've caught fish, but I'm putting in a lot more effort on the days between trips to increase the odds of success. With a bit of research and a whole lot of hours on the river, I'm feeling a lot more qualified to claim my space in the fishing industry.
None of this could happen without a tremendous amount of luck. I believe that a lot of my fishing successes this season can be attributed to trial and error, but I've been fortunate to have family who are willing to babysit, as well as family and friends who are patient enough to join me for "one more cast."
Thank you all for being a part of this journey with me. Here's to many more adventures, memories, and, of course, great fishing trips ahead.
If you liked this episode, leave a review on Spotify. It really helps me to produce a better show when I know what's resonating with my listeners and what has missed the mark. If you've got ideas for a future episode, or if you'd like to keep up with my latest fishing trips and behind-the-scenes content, follow me on Instagram and Facebook. Lastly, if you're looking for freshwater fishing tackle and tips, check out my website at NewDawnTackleCo.shop.
Until next time, tight lines and happy fishing!
