Aug. 9, 1902.] 
FOREST AND STREAM 
109 
rising, as I write. The many boats at Callicoon are tied 
lip and few anglers are to be seen. _ 
Further down the river, say two miles below Calli- 
coon, there are two fine eddies, and another one at 
Cochecton, N. Y., while at the latter town one can go 
to Laurel Lake, four miles distant, in Pennsylvania, for 
pickerel, perch and bass; to Huntington Lake, about six 
miles from the town, in New York State, for similar fish. 
Then Tyler's brook is near, and the trout fishing, I was 
told, is good in low water. 
One of the deepest eddies on the Delaware is reached 
from Nar-cowsburg. N. Y., distant about 125 miles from 
New York city. Like Callicoon, Narrowsburg has an 
abundance of boats and guides for hire, and in some 
places the pool is easily fished from shore, especially a 
short distance above the town and on the Pennsylvania 
side. Some big wall-eyed pike are taken, and all varie- 
ties of bass. Parties go from Narrowsburg to Mast 
Hope, about six miles, in large flat-bottomed scows, fish- 
ing the rift and eddies en route, and return by train. 
While passing down I saw numerous camps and talked 
with anglers, but while each one praised the fishing in low 
water, they were taking no game fish at the time, so 
high and muddy was the river. But there are good pools 
all the way. 
There is an eddy a mile above Mast Hope, and Ten 
Mile River enters the Delaware at its head. Inquiries 
as to this pool should be sent to Tusten Postoffice, N. 
Y., which is alongside the eddy and immediately below 
Ten Mile River. This stream has a good reputation for 
trout and is easy to follow, as a road is adjacent. 
There are several lakes near Mast Hope and .two 
creeks. Campfield and Simms ponds and Westcolang 
Lake are all within five miles of the village, which is 
prettily located in the pines, and they contain the usual 
varieties of game fish. 
It seems unlikely that the fishing in the Delaware will 
be good before August 8, even if the storms blow over 
and the river falls and clears in its usual time. To-day 
there is little encouragement in the skies, which are still 
overcast, and rains hare fallen all about, as well as here 
at Mast Hope. Better luck next time. 
Perry D. Frazer. 
Mast Hope Falls. 
New England Waters* 
BosTONj Aug. 2. — Still there is good fishing at most of 
the Maine resorts, although the season is usually practi- 
cally closed to trolling by the middle of July, and fly- 
fi.?hing is generally poor the rest of that month and all of 
August. It is likely that the cold and wet summer has 
had much to do with prolonging the fishing. The water 
in most of the Maine lakes is almost up to full banks, 
which is A^ery unusual so far into the summer. C. G. 
Brown writes friends here that he has good sport at the 
Birches, Mooselucmaguntic Lake. There was one great 
day last week, Avhen almost everybody got fish. Mr. C. A. 
Robinson, of South Windham, Me., formerly a devotee 
of Sebago fishing, but who has built a fine camp this sea- 
son on the Decker Purchase, Mooselucmaguntic Lake, is 
having great fishing. He writes a Boston friend a glow- 
ing account of what he did in one day last week. Mr. 
B. D. Stevens, a Lake Auburn angler, keeps on fishing 
as opDortunity offers. He landed a salmon of five pounds 
the other day. 
Bass fishermen are having some very good sport. Mr. 
W. C. Harding and Mr. Howard Brandenburg, both Bos- 
ton printers, went up the Sudbury to Wayland Monday. 
Luck seemed "to turn against Mr. Harding. He hooked 
four apparently good fish, but succeeded in landing 
neither. Mr. Brandenburg caught seven bass, from one 
and a half up to five pounds, though he too lost four or 
five fish. The big bass Avas a surprise to both fishermen. 
Plump five pounds of fighting bass give an experience that 
does not often fall to the lot of an angler within a few 
miles of Boston. 
Aug. 4. — For one I rejoice in the position the Granite 
State will take on the hunter's license question, through 
her Fish and Game Commissioners, and such sensible 
writers as Mr. Stark, provided Maine is foolish enough 
to adopt such a system. I can assure him that in that 
event a great many hunters will turn New Hampshire- 
ward. In speaking of the proposition to license hunters 
who go to Maine, a gentleman who has hunted several 
s-easons in Maine recently said that New Hampshire 
would be left to hunt in without paying toll, and he should 
go there. He also remarked that he admired the good 
sense of the New Hampshire Commissioners in that they 
have gone straight forward, and have not been disposed 
to dabble in all sorts of schemes for getting fnoney. 
"They have not invented spoon hooks and spinners, nor 
have they made September license laws, and have not 
taken the moose law into their own hands, if the illegal 
shooting happened to have been done by the sons of 
rich men." 
Mr. E. C. Stevens is back from his summer fishing at 
Lake Dunmore, Salisbury, Vermont. Mr. Stevens speaks 
in the highest terms of this lake and its fishing, as well 
as the surroundings. He was out every morning, before 
the sun was warm, and fished again in the evening. He 
caught bass up to three pounds, and his biggest pickerel 
weighed 6^2 pounds. One morning he was out with a 
guide and a minister — ^the minister to fish, of. course. 
Trolling across a place noted for its big pickerel, he had 
a strike that satisfied him that he had struck the fish that 
he "had been laying for for ten years." The splash was a 
great one, and the fish turned. With a single dart the 
bamboo rod — "nearly as big as my wrist," Mr. Stevens 
says, was in two pieces. "Even then I thought I could 
hold him, for the line was a good one, and I had him by 
the top of the rod, with fifteen or twenty feet of line out. 
But after half a minute the line came to me. minus hooks 
and leader. The vicious old shark had cut the line off 
with his sharp teeth. I did not swear, because I never 
do, and beside there was the minister in the boat. He 
mildly remarked that 'it is very provoking. That fish 
weighs ten pounds if he does an ounce.* " 
At Kineo, Moosehead, the fishing is reported to be good. 
Lenox Smith, o'f New York city, has lately taken some 
good strings, trout of three and a half and three and 
fhree-quarter pounds—large ones for Moosehpsd, At 
Upper Richardson lake the camp owners are assembling, 
including Mr. Emerson McMillan, of New York; the 
Messrs. Bayard, John E. and E. V, R. Thayer, of Bos- 
ton, and their families. Mr. E. V. R. Thayer has built a 
beautiful camp on the Camp Stewart lot that he pur- 
chased last fall. At the Upper Dam some trout and 
salmon are still being taken. At the Birches Mr. John 
S. Hall, of Southbridge, Mass., got a trout of six and a 
half pounds last week. Mr. Isaac R. Thomas, of Boston, 
caught a four-pound and a five-pound salmon, and Master 
Arthur Thomas got a trout of four and three-quarter 
pounds. Mr. Fred E'. Jones, of Brookline, Mass., at the 
Mooselucmaguntic House, landed three salmon on Friday, 
one of three and a half, four and a quarter and six and a 
half pounds. John Alberger, of Philadelphia, also got 
some good fish, including a salmon of three and a half 
pounds. At the Bangor salmon pool a great many fish 
are being seen, some jumping on to the apron of the dam. 
But few are taking the hook. Fishing parties are now 
in order for Aroostook county, particularly the northern 
part. The Oxbow region is good, and also the region 
further north. Many fishing and camping parties are 
making the great carry trip through from Norcross to 
the Allaguash waters and down that stream to Van Buren. 
Great numbers of deer and moose are being seen, with 
now and then a caribou. Fine strings of brook trout are 
being taken in the vicinity of Plymouth, N. H. The 
waters of the Pemigewasset River are well spoken of. A 
string of thirty trout was taken from Hancock Brook last 
week by a conductor on the Boston & Maine system. 
Last week Mi". Hull and Mr. Thornton got 100 trout 
from the streams in that valley. Guests at the Profile 
House, and other summer resorts, improve the time in 
fishing. The very cold and wet season has been favor- 
able thus far. 
Mr. J. H. Jones, of Boston, has lately had some rare 
sport bass fishing at Crystal Lake, Canaan, N. LI. He 
fished with his little son, and the youngster enjoyed the 
sport as much as his father, if such a thing is possible. 
They took sixteen bass at one trip of only about an hour 
and a half, and twenty-one at another trip. Even the 
boy was not satisfied, and wanted to "catch one more," 
although it was nearly dark. A curious feature of Mr. 
Jones' fishing was that the inhabitants around were not 
aware that there were any such fish in the lake, till 
presented with a mess of bass, all nicely skinned and 
dressed by Mr. Jones. Special. 
Rotten Pond in Bloom. 
Rotten Pond is purging at present and has been 
undergoing that process for some time. Some people 
imagine that purging prevents fish from biting, but the 
trouble is that those people do not know where to look 
for the fish, for the latter are just as hungry whether the 
water is clear or clouded. Fish do not like the state of 
the water when the purging is going on, no more than 
the people here like the black smoke of the soft coal. 
Fish will get away from it just as people get away from 
the smoke. Purging in a pond is due to the ripening of 
vegetation under water; the little seed bulbs arise to the 
surface and remain there until they ripen, when the live 
seed is precipitated to the bottom in order to produce 
more vegetation next year. The hulls which contained 
the seeds remain on the water until they decompose or 
until the wind blows them to shore. Some ponds, like 
Green Pond and Hanks' Pond, never purge, because 
they do not contain that pecuhar vegetation which 
causes the purging process. As said above, fish try to 
get out of the clouded water and betake themselves to 
parts of the pond where the bottom is composed of 
rocks, gravel and sand and where are consequently no 
ascending bulbs or descending seeds. Consequently, in 
such places the fishing is better than usual. But to pur- 
sue the simile of the black smoke further, there are 
places like Pittsburg and Cincinnati where nothing but 
soft coal is burned and where, consequently, there is al- 
ways moke. Rotten Pond is one of the Pittsburgs among 
ponds; it produces the vegetation which causes purg- 
ing, all over its entire area. In such cases the fish do 
as the people do in Pittsburg, get used to it. In such 
ponds purging does not interfere with fishing, although 
it forms a convenient excuse for want of luck or skill. 
Purging is not a very remarkable feature of Rotten 
Pond, but the character of the bass there is. Rotten _ 
Pond was stocked from Oldham brook and the Passaic' 
River, and in neither of these waters are the big-mouthed 
bass particularly gamj-. But it is a question whether 
there is a pond in the country where the bass possess 
more gamy qualities than they do in Rottten Pond. The 
big-mouthed, excepting in swiftly flowing streams, is a 
sluggish fish compared to the small-mouthed, but in 
Rotten Pond, for some unexplained cause, the- big- 
mouthed is about as gamy as nature ever made fish. 
Instead of going to the bottom when hooked, as the 
big-mouthed does in Greenwood and most other lakes, 
the fish in Rotten Pond come straight to the surface and 
frequently jump out of the water five or six times before 
they are landed. Captain Simonton, of the local fire 
department, who fished Rotten Pond on Monday last, 
took up the better half of half an hour in landing a big- 
mouthed" bass which did not weigh more than two and 
a half pounds. In Greenwood Lake, Wawayanda Lake 
and other waters, where there are plenty of big-mouthed 
bass, the captain could have easily landed half a dozen 
fish of that size in the time it took him to land that one 
in Rotten Pond. This peculiar characteristic of the bass 
in Rotten Pond has never been explained and probably 
never will be. 
The question has frequently been asked what makes 
fishing so good in nearly every newly constructed pond, 
and this question is easily answered. There was, per- 
haps, never better fishing than was afforded by the 
reservoirs of the East Jersey Water Co. above New- 
foundland three or four years after the water was first 
let into these ponds. The cause of this good fishing is 
the large volume of food to be found there. Vegetation 
which grows under water spreads very quickly, and when 
lands have been submerged the soil is very rich. The 
result of this abundance of vegetation is the production 
of a great deal of food for the small fish and the latter 
Oi^ijtiply in proportion, thus affording an abundance of 
food for the larger fish. There is one principle true of 
all fishing waters; the amount of fish produced is in di- 
rect proportion to the quantity of food to be found there. 
When there is plenty of food there will be plenty of fish. 
Rotten Pond was stocked some eight or nine years ago; 
it has passed' its prime as a fishing place and its future 
will depend more upon the food placed in it for the big 
fish than on the number of big fish put in there. Mr. 
Frothingham is well versed in such matters, and it is 
safe to say that as long as he controls Rotten Pond 
there will be good fishing there. It is not as good now 
as it has been; in fact, frequently it is very poor, but a 
year or two of intelligent stocking will soon bring back 
the fish.— Chas. A. Shriner, in Paterson, N. J., Chron- 
icle. 
CHICAGO AND THE WEST. 
Back from the Nepigon, 
Mr. Oswald von Lengerke and Mr. Charles Lester are 
back from their trip to the Nepigon River. They were 
gone two and a half weeks. It takes four days to get 
to the fishing from Chicago, and four days to get back 
again. These gentlemen had excellent success on their, 
trip, and are delighted with the country, which they de- 
scribe as beautiful and interesting. They had fine suc- 
cess in fishing, taking about 75 pounds of trout _ daily. 
They brought back birch bark mountings of skins _ of 
several very handsome trout, their heaviest fish weighing 
5^4 pounds. Mr. Von Lengerke took three which weighed 
4?4, 4^2 and 4% pounds, these being his three first fish. 
They came near to tiring him out. 
The record trout on the Nepigon is pounds, there 
haying been only three fish of that weight taken in twenty 
years. The numbers of trout seem unexhausted in this 
famous stream, and although the trip is one oflfering no 
.special interest or news, the fishing itself is exciting and 
thoroughly satisfactory. 
Mr. Von Lengerke says that the Canadian Government 
has this year set an Indian to destroying the great north- 
ern pike in the Nepigon River below the lake. This In- 
dian is working with gill nets. In one night he caught 
170 pike. Mr. Von Lengerke saw one pile of sixty pike 
which would average over twenty pounds each. These 
fish are all buried, no use being made of them at all. The 
intention is to rid the stream of these fish and to keep the 
trout. The anglers complain that these great pike ruin 
their tackle and there is no stopping them. 
These gentlemen report that there were seven parties 
beside their own on the Nepigon at the time they were in. 
Of these, one-was from New York, two from Minneapolis, 
the rest unknown. Mr, Von Lengerke states that, so far 
from the supply of trout in the Nepigon being cut down, 
it is abundant to the limit of any anglers desire. 
The Mississippi River Small-Mottths. 
I used to think I was a good deal of a fisherman, and 
then I used to think I was at least something of a fisher- 
m.an. I know better now. I have' been mixed up with 
those Mississippi River small-mouth bass again, and they 
li#\-e convinced me that I don't know very much about 
bass fishing. 
I wanted to go out to Lake Minnetonka to see the folks 
last week, and on the way out thought I would stop on 
the Mississippi river for a little bass fishing. Of course 
there was no one to go along. One's friends always fail 
at the last moment. Moreover, I knew that the Mis- 
sissippi River was extraordinarily high, as it has been for 
a month. But such little matters as this ought not to dis- 
courage a man who really feels he ought to catch a mess 
of bass. Hence I did not change my intention of stopping 
for a try on the Father of W'aters. I got off at Wabasha, 
Minn., below the mouth of Lake Pepin, and Just below 
the mouth of the Chippewa River. I did not know any 
one here excepting Mr. H. B. Jewell, a sportsman of 
some thirty years' or more experience in Minnesota. Oh 
the way up from the depot I heard of Ira Weeks, a man 
who owned a good gasoline launch. I chased Ira all over 
town, and at last found him, big. quiet, good natured, and 
he in turn chased all over town until he caught Louis 
Longhway, a local boatman who says that is the way he 
spells his name, although I suspect him of being French 
and believe the way ought to be "Longuet." There was 
a circus in town that day at Wabasha, and Mr. Jewell and 
Ira Weeks and Louis and I all saw something of the 
circus, which made us feel young again. Hence it was 
after noon before Louis and I started down the river m 
his fishing skiff, with the understanding that Ira was to 
go down with his launch and take Louis up later in the 
evening ten miles below Wabasha. 
Louis and I found the Father of Waters much excited, 
very high indeed, and getting higher. All the flat lands 
on both sides of the big river were filled with sloughs and 
cut-offs. The main stream itself looked so turbirlent and 
uninviting that we determined to try the sloughs, thinking 
that the fish might have been driven in there by the 
freshets. We wandered off into one of these sloughs 
away from the main river, and traveled five or six 
miles in this way before we came back to the river again. 
Everything looked very bad for fly-fishing, and it Avas only 
fly-fishing which I cared for. And yet there were good 
signs of bass even under such unpromising conditions. 
I saw a big pool along the bank where the bass were 
feeding, and cast the fly over that place. As it sank, 1 
felt a heavy tug and for a moment thought I had the fish 
fastened, but he ran deep and broke away. Accident 
No. I. I made light of this and told Louis that it was not 
in the least important. Pretty soon something very simi- 
lar happened again, and it happened five or six times m 
the same hour before we managed to get a bass into the 
boat. This was a fish weighing about a pound and a 
half. , . 0-1 
We passed out into the old Beef River cut-oft, where 
the Chippewa River logs used to be sent through, and 
where we now found plenty of good fishing country. A 
little stone pier looked likely to me, and I got Louis to 
row me over. I cast at the edge of the stones, and at once 
had a very heavy strike, raising this fish to the surface 
of the water. Once more I cast in, and again had a 
strike, the bass running very deep and feeling tremendous- 
ly heavy. A third time I cast, and a third tirne had 
