‘One Damn Fine Month’

Sometimes you should just take the day off. May 12, 2017, was one of those days. If I had not, if I had let that May 12 slip away, if it had become just another workday where I woke up, fought traffic, sat in meetings, and answered emails and phone calls before fighting some more traffic, getting home, eating dinner, watching TV and going to bed, well, let’s just say it would have been a mistake.

I took the day off after I saw an approaching high-pressure system settling in with temperatures rising into the low 70s. As Morgan Freeman’s character Red said in The Shawshank Redemption, “May is one damn fine month to be working outdoors.” The same can be said of fishing — particularly in the Northeast, where options can overflow like an all-you-can-eat banquet. Where I live in New Jersey, stripers are hot on the tails of arriving schools of menhaden, while bluefish have invaded the shallow bays, ready to blast anything that chugs, pops or skips their way.

But it was the call of freshwater streams and rivers that had me