My younger son and I took a drive this afternoon to scout a body of water that we had seen on the map but never visited before, called Choquette's Pond in Clarksburg.
It was sunny and in the low 80's.
Although it was not easy to tell from the map, it turns out that all the access to Choquette's is entirely on private property, so we scotched that idea and decided to take a look at another small, no-name pond set in the middle of an area about a "block" away characterized by marshy spots interspersed with dry hillocks.
This no-name pond yielded some of the smallest fish that I've ever seen. We ended up catching sunfish (ranging from 1" to 4"), one tiny (3") bullhead, and a few dace (ranging from 3" to 8").
On the drive home, my son indulged me and let me borrow his hipboots so that I could fish the North Hoosic in North Adams below the Eclipse Mill dam.
The stream levels were incredibly low, even by local standards, and I had no hits for most of the stretch heading down from the dam.
Fortunately, at the lower end of the run (a little above where the stream enters the flood control chutes), after two false strikes where I had a hit but failed to set the hook in time, I finally managed to reel in what turned out to be one honey of a fish: an 18" rainbow that looked (and fought) as if it were even larger.
I was lucky to land the darn thing because I had barely (and I mean barely) lip hooked it - - although, on the plus side, that made it much easier to release it unharmed.
