Scales and Tales

I remember seeing my first hatch of the 17-year cicadas back in 1973. Just entering my ‘teens at the time, I was already a die-hard largemouth bass fan, and enjoyed catching pickerel, bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish as well. It was sometime during that June when I read a piece in a fishing magazine about “matching the hatch,” for trout. The basic theory held that trout favored whichever hatching fly or terrestrial insect was in the greatest supply at the moment, and matching your flies to that particular insect would virtually guarantee fishing success.

Well, it didn’t take long before I was casting grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, caterpillars and just about any creepy, crawly bug I could find to the captive audience of fish in Sayville Mill Pond, Bayport’s Lotus Lake, and even Cow Pond, a small puddle toward the south end of Sayville’s Broadway Park that once held a few panfish, bass, bullfrogs and leopard frogs. Cow Pond has dwindled to a tiny puddle over the years, and biologists fear that leopard frogs may by now be extinct on Long Island, but the lessons learned fishing that summer have held with me to this very day.

So it was that I found myself thinking back to those glory days while examining cicadas from the woods of Ridge late last week. As I pondered how to match their size and shape, I recalled using them for bait that long ago summer. When the hatch ran its course and my supply of free bait came to an end, I struggled to keep the action alive by tossing various surface poppers. Eventually, I settled on casting a small, black Jitterbug. I would toss it out near weed beds, twitch it gently once or twice, and then reel it back with a slow and steady retrieve. The bass smacked that little lure right through the end of the summer – and I was forever hooked on topwater action.

I’m happy to report Jitterbugs are still included in my freshwater arsenal, and they still work great, especially for tempting largemouth bass after dark. Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve been throwing a one-quarter-ounce size during the day on several ponds and the surface strikes have been furious, especially in the late afternoon when cicadas are most prone to take to the air. My guess is that the cicadas have become the hatch to match on some freshwaters in mid- and eastern Suffolk County. If you have a black Jitterbug rattling around inside your tackle box, break it out for a few casts. You may find the response tremendously explosive.