Where I like to fish, come late April, life turns viable again. Fiddleheads. Trees leafing out. Loons calling. And smallmouth bass, after a long fast, are ravenous and bedridden as they prepare to spawn. My spot — a shining, coldwater secret wrapped in long, green hills — always blindsides me. We’re talking a mile of shoreline under red spruce and hemlock, shallows rutted with bass beds, some so near the surface you can almost reach down and scatter the stones. I tried counting them once but gave up on the third bed as a beer-keg smally, my fifth of the morning, charged off with my line. Northern Vermont, if the soul survives winter, delivers huge rewards.
All through the dark months I’d been trying to imagine how best to approach the spring, not just emotionally but materially. What did I lack? Like most fishermen, I tend to play an annual roulette, trying to shorten the payout odds of each painstaking purchase: is this the year I re-up on sunglasses and a vest, or splurge on a fantasy accessory, like a carbon-fiber boat net, a cold-cell beer cooler, an immaculate large arbor reel for my sink-tip line? Or all of the above? Certain years, like this one, when I’ve gone six-odd months with no fish, Monopoly bills start to look real. Inevitably, I begin filling my fly-box and overhauling my canoe, not quite believing my credit card bill will ever arrive.
This question feels innate, essential even to our humanity: what accessories best accommodate a freshwater canoe fisherman? We’ve all been there, fumbling with second-rate sunglasses, headlamps, thermoses, rods, reels, etc., or reaching for something in the boat that isn’t there, or discovering that your dry-sack suddenly isn’t as dry as advertised. I’m still worried that a piece of hate mail I penned to a certain rod manufacturer last year might draw the attention of the FBI. At any rate, the salesman in me hesitates to oversell these things, but I cannot name or imagine better products. All have been ruthlessly field tested — fish-slimed, beer-soaked, and in some instances, lake-dunked — and I’ve come to love each one.
Sage Bolt
The ultra-fast action Sage Bolt 590-4 is engineered to deal with nagging winds (a ubiquitous lake-fishing irritant) and reduce casting fatigue over long distances; your arms will get tired from paddling, but not from casting. Ideal for throwing heavy bass poppers, streamers and nymph rigs.
