I got skunked, just to get that out of the way. Timing a springtime pike bite is hard enough when you currently live five hours from the spot and will only get one morning because you’re not actually there to fish. It becomes even more technical (fly shop lingo for “probably not worth your time”) when Burlington gets a foot and a half of snow the day before you show up and the backwater you’re wading through is now a smidge under forty degrees and dropping. I lived on Lake Champlain during college. Although these early conditions can be massively unproductive, there was always a heavy air of anticipation hanging over the empty waters and thawing shorelines, as if any cast would be the one to break the season wide open and jump the lake back to life.
On this day, the whole city also hummed with a similar energy. I had come North along with thousands of others for the solar eclipse that would be passing directly over my old home. Despite my early start, I was slightly alarmed by the numbers of cars heading into town as I went the other way. I knew that the choice spot I had snagged in front of a friend’s apartment had likely already been gobbled up by hordes of travelers wearing solar-proof glasses and t-shirts with phrases like “I Blacked Out in Burlington, Vermont!” When I arrived at a boat ramp I used for wading access and started rigging up, I stirred the few dozen camper van occupants who had decided to spend the night in the parking lot. A couple of years ago the audacious behaviors of out-of-towners in these regularly sleepy parts would’ve bothered me, but I didn’t have anything against them any more. In a bittersweet way, I understood I was just as much of a tourist here now.
The pike treated me like one too, literally giving me the cold shoulder as the bay’s main tributaries belched out hundreds of cubic feet per second of fresh freezing snowmelt. Less than an hour’s worth of passes over my prime spots told me everything I needed to know about sticking around longer. When I lived up here, I had the luxury of picking and choosing conditions and could time warming lake temperatures and dropping pressures to start my season with some aggressive esox. Now I stood waist deep in the icy bay, nervously watching as the campers headed into town and knowing if I didn’t bail soon, I’d be walking into Burlington.
Significant memories are often joined by contextual tags; mine are often fishing related:
I remember hitting a new lake I’d scouted out the morning of the first date with a high school girlfriend. When the questionable early spring trout fishing actually panned out, I showed up confident as could be for what proved to be an awkward dinner.
I remember the last gathering with my best friends from college, and the same-day bass excursion I went on with some buddies beforehand. I ended the night with poignant well wishes, a new feeling of emptiness, and my right thumb ripped to sandpaper from countless smallmouth lips.
I remember peeling off my frozen waders on an early January morning and getting into my car, then hearing that the capital had been mobbed by rioters ahead of Inauguration Day. I listened to radio reports in silence for the entire drive home.
I remember pulling onto my street after a summer fishing trip in Vermont and getting a phone call that a person close to me had been diagnosed with a terminal condition. A few years later, on the day they were going to pass away, I got on the water again. I casted deeper and deeper into my temporary sanctuary until I received word of their death and went to pieces.
It’s funny how fishing, or any other passion you’ve fallen into with similar vigor, weaves its way into your life like that. You bring something that was really only ever meant to be a hobby into your world for most of the time you’ve been alive, and when you look back on your existence it was holding your hand the whole time. My quick trip to Vermont was for a potential once in a lifetime experience that had nothing to do with angling, but I just know part of me will always be wondering if I could’ve pulled out at least one little lethargic pike that morning with a fly change or different rate of retrieve.
I watched the eclipse on the Burlington waterfront with the masses. In the days before the event I considered heading somewhere more remote, but changed my mind in the end. Solar eclipses have been tracked and celebrated by civilizations for thousands of years (most of them didn’t know about fly fishing for pike so they had nothing else to look forward to), and I think there’s something innately human about seeing one with as many people as possible. I might never fully forget running out of options on the water the morning of April 8th, 2024, but later that afternoon when skies dimmed, the horizons blazed with warped kaleidoscopic sunlight, and multiple stadiums worth of soul-stirred travelers fell silent on an empty lake… I’d get skunked a few more times to see that again.
And when I recall the story of my moving to Boston a few weeks later, I’ll have some better content from when I stopped in Burlington again on the way.
