
The pleasures of the inland lake 
HEN I tell my friends out West 
Vf that I do little ocean fishing, 
despite the fact that I live on 
Long Island, and have a fair choice of 
all sorts of salt water sport, but that 
I stick pretty closely to my first love, 
the black bass, they invariably ask one 
question, “But where do you go for 
them?” And when I tell them I fish al- 
together on Long Island, they are as- 
tonished, for it is not generally known, 
I believe, even among New York people, 
that you do not have to drive far out 
on “the island” to find great stretches 
of country hardly touched by man. 
To illustrate this, and departing, for 
a moment, from the subject of my finny 
friends, not many people know that 
deer have so increased out here on the 
island, that the farmers wish that. the 
state would amend the game laws’ to 
permit hunters to take them, for they 
damage crops to a serious extent. As 
close*in as Middle Island, only seventy 
miles from New York, Fred Brenner, 
a merchant at that crossroads village, 
saw three deer in his orchard not long 
ago, and Week Edwards, who lives a 
bit off the main road, not long ago 
had a genuine battle with a buck that 
was goring his milech cows within a 
hundred yards of his home, early one 
morning. 
But to get back to fish—we drove to 
Lake Ronkonkoma, one of the most 
beautiful little lakes I have ever seen, 
about 55 miles from the East River, 
a number of times and occasionally fol- 
lowed the custom, popular. down there, 
of fishing for little yellow perch before 
we discovered that it would be worth 
while to try for better game. 
One day my wife, who fishes as well 
as I do, was sure she saw some small 
bass near the shore—of the kind we call 
“vearlings.” We began to try, then, in 
earnest, and time after time, through 
332 
diligent fishing, we escaped without a 
single whitewashing, though we seldom 
took more than one or two. 
But in Ronkonkoma we have never 
either captured nor seen anything but 
big-mouthed bass, and my friend, Mr. 
Raynor, who lives near the lake and has 
been there for many years, has told me 
he believes there are no small-mouth 
bass there. 
The best I ever did there was three 
pounds eight ounces, and I took this 
fellow on a wooden minnow at dusk one 
July evening, in more than fifty feet of 
water. 
We have also used a fly there at times, 
and bait (especially live minnows), but 
the wooden lures have been best. 
Though none of us (our 12-year-old 
son often goes with us) has ever been 
able to find a crayfish about the lake, 
these bass appear to take a wooden 
crayfish about as readily as a minnow. 
This has been a mystery to me, since 
they do, on the other hand, appear’ to 
have a preference for minnow lures 
that simulate a yellow perch. They 
apparently feed largely on _ yellow 
perch, 
But Ronkonkoma is a hard piece of 
water to fish. There are no logs, 
no stumps, no lily pads. There are, of 
course, times when you can discover 
that the bass are in the shallower water 
at the sides of the lakes, but on the 
whole this lake is what a fisherman 
calls “erratic” and this not only is my 
experience, but early last season I had 
the pleasure of a chat down there with 
Louis Rhead, who has known the lake 
ever since Hector was a pup, and he 
made the same comment. 
Until my business brought me to 
New York I had fished mostly in 
streams, and I knew them by heart. 
I knew where every watersoaked log, 
Bass in the Back 
Yard of 
New York City 
A Story of Near Metropolitan 
Angling Possibilities 
i i el 
By CARL HUNT 
every stump, every big rock was; and — 
I knew, too, that as often as I took a 
beauty from such a spot, another would — 
soon take up his habitation there. And 
most of the lakes I had fished gave me 
an opportunity to “figure the bass,” as 
I call it. : 
ERE is a bit of water that is dif- 
ferent. An old timer told me the 
lake was 90 feet deep in spots (though | 
I have never measured more than about 
50 feet), which is of interest in pass- 
ing because, if so, the bottom must be 
about on a level with or even below the 
level of Long Island Sound and the 
Atlantic Ocean on either side and not 
many miles away. There is no stream 
in, no stream out; no special place to 
look for your bass. But we have found 
that the: bigger fellows may be ex- 
pected just at the edge of the very deep 
water. For some distance from the 
shore, the lake is quite shallow, but at 
about six or eight feet, it goes down 
precipitously, and it is on the edge of 
this deep water that we have done 
best. 
At “Ronkonk,” as we call it, we have 
had a lot of fun with rock bass. Here, 
again, we had to do a lot of experiment- 
ing. But one day while rowing in about 
six feet of water, casting for bass that 
took no interest in us whatever, we ob- 
served an old boat that had sunk, up- 
side down, and had been there so long 
that the upturned bottom had rotted 
out. We went ashore, rigged with 
hooks, captured a few grasshoppers 
and took out of that boat, as rapidly as 
we cared to take them, a fine mess of 
rock bass, averaging a little above half — 
a pound each. We did this time after 
time, until some vigilant summer 
visitors observed us and fished the spot 
to death—and to cap the climax, some 
_ bathers hauled.the two sides of the 
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