Of Natives, Anadromy, and Rural Connecticut

There is something endlessly fascinating about the relationship between the inland riverine and the coastal littoral, and there is no better place to fall in love with appreciating and exploring this interaction than where I live: coastal Connecticut. Within the tidewater (on the predominately freshwater end of it), less than 2 miles from the open Sound, I've caught yellow perch, largemouth bass, fallfish (a member of the chub/dace family) and of course stocked and holdover trout. (The wild sea run salmo trutta will come someday).  In this water, at the very same time, I've seen alewives, peanut bunker, large menhaden and blue crabs both living and dead.  The striped bass and bluefish chase these baitfish all the way up the river and feast on them--side by side with the resident largemouth bass. One of these days there will be the possibility of catching both the saltwater stripers and the freshwater largemouths out of the same water at the same time!

Here is a fallfish taken from my "homewater" on Sunday morning, just 1 mile from my house and 2 miles from the sound:

      My business peregrinations take me through central/northern/eastern Connecticut on a regular basis. There are dozens of rivers, streams, brooks and even lakes there that I would like to fish. However because of the demands of both home and work and the time it takes to drive, it is a rare treat to be able to take advantage of these locations. When I do, it is a real treat. Of course one of the major draws is the native brook char (whom I have been obsessively chasing), but as I've discussed previously, this is not so easy to achieve. Yet there are other natives to be found, and these can be just as satisfying if you allow yourself to consider that they too are wild fishes, selectively feeding in a natural environment.

One of my favourites, perhaps because they are reminiscent of catching a brook trout, is the fallfish.

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I caught this one above one evening on the way back to Boston. It is somewhere in northeastern Connecticut--the "Quiet Corner." You can see the legs of the fly popper it took hanging out of its mouth. I caught a few of them and because they are exuberant surface feeders it is a thrill to watch them strike the fly.

Below is another one (or perhaps one of the other dace/chubs) I caught in a delicious brook hiding in central Connecticut:

I caught it just yesterday (Monday) morning. It was a lovely day.

In another post I'll tell you about the bass I caught later in the evening in Massachusetts---too much fishing for one day haha!