TRAILER
SECRET SPOT A
bout the time that you’re reading this, I could be facing the same dilemma that I did at the beginning of last summer.
While prospecting solo, I found good action in a difficult-to-fish area near a
seldom-used access. No one else was fishing that bay on any of my early explo- rations. That’s as good as it gets. And also when you should keep your mouth shut. I brought a few friends in on the discovery on the condition that they couldn’t
be explicit about where we actually were if they talked to someone about it, and they should say that we put in at some access site other than where we actually launched. And they did, as far as I know. One fellow felt especially bad when a friend of his specifically asked where he’d been and he said he couldn’t divulge that because the person who took him there requested radio silence. It’s harder than ever to keep a good thing to yourself unless you fish solo
or with just one tight-lipped pal. It helps if you don’t do social media, which I don’t and neither do most of my friends, largely because we’re of that some- what disconnected age. There is some personal irony about this for me, because for decades, as the
fishing editor for Field and Stream, I was in the business of dispensing informa- tion about great places to cast a line. Once, when living in New York, someone asked why I never wrote about fishing in the county where I lived. I explained that, first, I wrote for a national audience, most of whom were not interested in the specifics about our area, and, second—and far more important— that I lived there and didn’t want my favorite places overrun.
78…KAYAK ANGLER
TO SHARE OR NOT TO SHARE—THERE IS NO QUESTION BY KEN SCHULTZ
Back to last summer. One misty, hot August morning I took a friend, who
was visiting from another state, to my still-secret hotspot. No one was at the access, but I’d barely turned my vehicle around when a friend who was not in on the discovery drove up. My first thought was that he’d tailed me here. We got our rigs in the water and I went over to him, by then thinking more ra-
tionally and suspecting that one of my previous companions had tipped him off. “What brings you here?” I asked. He probably realized how surprised I was to see him, but to his credit he
didn’t angrily explain to me that it was a free world, that I didn’t own the water, that he had every right to be there. He simply said, “Well, I know you’re catch- ing fish and I figured that you were up this way someplace. I just decided to try here today.” This fellow’s a good guy and a friend and I believed him. So I gave him some
navigational advice and fishing info, and wondered if the cat was out of the bag. It wasn’t. Only one other time did I encounter someone fishing that area who I had not previously taken there. Later that summer I gave a lecture and at the end a woman asked where my
favorite local place was to fish. A guy in the front row immediately saved me. “In the bay!” he shouted. Everyone laughed. “Next question?” I said. Ken Schultz (
www.kenschultz.com) was a staff writer and fishing editor of
Field & Stream for 31 years, he’s the author of 18 books on fishing and produces an annual Daily Fishing Tips calendar published by Gladstone Media.
ILLUSTRATION: LORENZO DEL BIANCO
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