Antsy angler season

An angler’s greatest asset is patience, or so we have been told. But this is a lie. Show me a patient fisherman and I will show you a fisherman who by definition isn’t catching any fish.

If bass fishermen were patient, why would they need to strap hundreds of horsepower to a slim slab of fiberglass and go rocketing off to a different part of the lake after just two unsuccessful casts?

And in the Adirondacks, no one is more antsy than an angler in that ghastly dead time of the year when the calendar says it’s spring but it’s really not, and the streams are running too high from snowmelt and the mountain’s legendary trout ponds and lakes remain entombed in ice.

Pike season is over, the state has shooed the shanty-dwellers off the lakes and the ice has taken on the deathly gray cast of an aging smoker. That ice, which was once so good to the fishing community, is now the enemy, as it