Watching the state stock Kahler’s Pond with trout last week brought back memories of fishing there when I was a kid. I lived a quick bicycle ride from the old mill pond and spent many days catching sunnies, perch, and bass.
Boy’s Life magazine gave me the idea to set an overnight rig to catch something when you’re not even there. I found a tree branch hanging over the water and tied a line and hook to it, baited with a big nightcrawler. When I returned the next morning, the branch was bent down into the water. Whatever was on the line sensed my approach and fought frantically against the limb. The water swirled as a serpentine shape came to the surface. A snake!
A friend’s big brother had warned us about poisonous snakes on Long Island, and I was sure I had a venomous water moccasin or cottonmouth on my hands. I grabbed the branch and carefully pulled it in, keeping my distance in case the creature lunged. As a kid whose playground was the outdoors, I thought I knew all the creatures of that pond—except for the one at the end of my line: not a vicious snake, but a slimy freshwater eel.
The waters of Kahler’s are still very clear, despite bird droppings that have closed it to swimming. From the dock by the waterfall, you could see sunfish hovering over the sandy patches they cleared for their nests. Chet Wilcox at B&B Tackle would gladly tell you everything you needed to know about fishing the pond, and he sold us tiny hooks perfect for catching them. What he didn’t mention was what would happen if you put a sunfish on a hook and let it swim around for a while.
I got bored with my fish on a leash and set the pole down on the dock. The next thing I knew, it was being dragged toward the water, and I grabbed it just in time. What I had on the line was no sunfish, and I fought it all the way in. The culprit was a hefty largemouth bass, which I carried home in a pail of water. It was still alive when my dad drove me back to Kahler’s to return it to where it belonged.
In 1984, a determined angler named Dave Romeo made the Guinness Book of World Records by catching 3,001 bass at Kahler’s. I’m pretty sure that 15 years earlier, I had caught their great-grandfather.