As I get older, trips that were fun fishing weekends in youth seem expeditionary, requiring more time to complete compared with the past, when I didn’t need to sleep and could drive all night. I also don’t like to drive at night anymore. The simple bottom line is that I stay closer to home and fish places that I might have ignored back when I thought that trout were the only species that existed, and all of them lived at the end of long road trips.
That was then, this is now.
There is a flood-control pond less than five miles from my house that is filled with little bass, and it has had crappies and bluegills (up to an honest pound or more) at different times. It gets a ton of fly-fishing pressure, mostly from me. The pond is not much of a secret, because I frequently see fathers and sons who have walked or bicycled over from a housing tract a quarter of a mile away. I ran into a neighborhood friend’s teenage son there and gave him a fly-casting lesson before he had to scurry off to an evening job at a department store. He had a two-hour window between his last class at school and the job and went to work smelling faintly of fish from the two bass he caught on poppers. That kid has his priorities in order.
The little pond sits on the edge of a chunk of native scrub habitat where I run my Labrador, call quail and coyotes, and occasionally see deer. I know where a red-tail nests each year, and I have seen horned lizards in the washes. I jokingly call the place the Matthews Ranch.
Don’t ask me where it is; it’s my secret little gold mine. Besides, there’s a place with your name on it close to where you live.
A lot of anglers are secretive about where they fish, which makes me a little crazy. They think they are some sort of Columbus and have discovered a secret treasure in a state with around a million anglers and 35 million other people who have prying eyes and a fishing friend they will tell where they saw you or me at our secret spot. There are spots — you can delude yourself into thinking they are secret, if you want — where you can fish in solitude. They aren’t secret; there just are reasons why they are lonely.
Go to Google Maps Satellite View, pull up the satellite image view of just about any place in California, start scrolling around, and you’ll see there is water everywhere. A lot of it is even accessible legally, or, at worst, you might need to ask permission to fish it. If I can find these places on Google Maps, so can you.
To be frank, some of these spots are good for a couple of seasons, then they dry up. (Flood-control ponds have this nasty habit.) Some are good until the golf course manager changes, and the new guy thinks the weeds in the pond are nasty and copper-sulfates them to death, ruining the fishing. Some are just darn hard to fish. (Pick any small trout stream running out of the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, or San Jacinto Mountains.) Still, they offer a chance for solitude, the thrill of discovery, and the epiphany that we have more than just the handful of blue-ribbon waters listed on a fly shop’s chalkboard.
You can even find fishable water in extraordinary places. Years ago, while working on a magazine in Orange County, I was picking up something in an office complex that had a pretty cool artificial stream running between all the offices. Of course I was checking out the water. Then I saw it: a trout slid out from a brick undercut bank to eat a bug off the surface. No way. I had a fly rod in my car and was working late that evening. I went back to see if anyone was in the complex past seven. Lights were on in offices all over the complex, and people were still going and coming, so I never broke out my tackle. But I did see an empty Rapala package stuck in the sand of one of those outside ashtrays, so I knew I wasn’t the only one.
The bottom line is that there is water everywhere, and a lot of it holds fish that’ll take a fly. If you find a really cool spot with big bluegills, drop a pin on Google Maps and forward it to me via e-mail. I won’t tell anyone else. Well, maybe my brother-in-law, R.G., but that’s it.
But finding and fishing secret little gold mines may not come without some risk. Here’s a precautionary tale. A lot of years ago, the late Mike Raahauge, owner of a pheasant-hunting c lub and shooting-range complex in Southern California’s Prado Basin and a dear friend, knew that I liked to fish and told me about a pond adjacent to the basin that had bass. He gave me directions and suggested I go over that afternoon and fish, telling me to just go through his buddy’s gate and to ignore the “No Trespassing” signs. I took off, not telling Mike that I had something to do right then, but I went by the next morning. I was a lot younger then and a lot more gullible. I did notice that the lock on the chain that secured the gate had been cut, but I drove in and fished for a couple of hours anyway. I hammered the bass, landing fish up to three pounds or so on Hank Neverka poppers. Then I went by to see Raahauge and thank him for the tip. He looked a little surprised, but smiled the whole time.
Raahauge liked to play jokes on people, and years later, someone let slip that I was supposed to be fishing when the owner did his evening check on the property and get run off. There was also some concern that the owner would call the sheriff if I mentioned that Raahauge had told me to go fish the place and that I might actually be cited or arrested. Apparently Raahauge and the owner were not the best of friends. “Constantly feuding” would be a better description. It might even have been a pair of Raahauge bolt cutters that granted me the midmorning access while the owner was off working, not having replaced the cut lock yet.
A few years ago, a buddy took R.G. and me to a little lake that had houses all around it in a poor neighborhood. It wasn’t a contemporary planned community, but the lake — a wide spot on an old irrigation channel that still carried water — might have served as an inspiration. There were no curbs or sidewalks, and the houses were old. We caught bass, bluegills, and warmouths and talked to kids who told about catfish and crappies. There was a half-submerged old box spring with the fabric rotted off that held a big school of bluegills that kept coming up to eat my little poppers. As evening fell, the neighborhood filled with the smells of cooking food, and people were sitting on porches and walking around the pond, talking and laughing. Apparently no one had seen a fly fisher except on television, and we must have been offered a dozen beers by people who wanted to talk.
I went back a decade later, but the pond was dry, and the neighborhood had degraded from simply poor to seedy and looked pretty rough. I didn’t stop. Sometimes gold mines play out.
