Years ago when I moved to the Adirondacks, I went fishing with John Vodron, an old Adirondack guide. He took me to a man-made lake in the Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area. The state built a dam on the Kunjamunk River, creating what was called the Kunjamunk Flow. After all the trash fish were poisoned and killed, they stocked it with brook trout. But over the years the locals overfished it, and the pickerel took over.
Well, John and I launched his canoe in the water and headed out. John sat in the back of the canoe and said, “I’ll paddle, and you take the fish off the hook and put them in the bucket.”
That sounded good, but I had no idea what that entailed. John cast a small silver spoon with a worm on the hook out towards a stump. Almost instantly he yelled, “I’ve got one!” I did my part and put the fish in the five gallon pail. Just as I was about to cast my bait out into the flow, John said, “I got another one,” and the agreed-upon procedure repeated itself. I took the fish off his hook and put it in the pail. And just like before, he had another fish on before I ever got my bait in the water. Now, I’m not sure how many fish he caught before I called a halt to our agreement, but it was a bunch.
John laughed as I reeled in my first fish.
Pickerel are a very aggressive fish, and the flow was overrun with them. You got a hit with every cast, so it didn’t take very long for us to fill that pail.
“So, what are we going to do with all these fish?” I asked.
“There’s an old timer over on Little Amsterdam Road who likes them. He takes all I can catch.”
“What does he do with them? I’ve always heard that they are too boney to eat.”
“He eats the big ones. After gutting them, he slices the fish from the backbone to the belly on both sides about every quarter inch. Then he fries them. The bones curl up, and he scrapes off the meat. I ate some with him one day. It was really good.”
“So what about the smaller ones?” I asked.
“He cuts them into smaller pieces and tills them into his garden for fertilizer.”
We made several trips to the flow that summer. It was fun. But as the trees changed color and the temperature dropped, we returned to the flow for another purpose. John had a duck blind on one of the points that jutted out into the flooded river. The mallards and black ducks came in by the hundreds. Several evenings we shot our limit before heading home.
But one evening as I sat a couple feet from the water’s edge, something splashed right in front of me. It was a brook trout bigger than I had ever seen.
“Was that a brookie? It was huge.” I asked John.
“Sure was. There are some big ones left, but they’re almost impossible to catch.”
Well, you can’t say I didn’t try. Many evenings I fished off that same brushy point in the flow, but I never saw that big fish again. John explained that there were loads of brook trout in the flow for the first few years, but when whole families caught their limits of trout in the morning and did the same in the afternoon several days in the week, the numbers steadily dropped. So eventually the pickerel took over once more.
Today the flow is gone. The dam fell into disrepair and the state decided it no longer fit into its idea of wilderness. We crossed it for many years while deer hunting, but now like the pickerel, ducks and brook trout, it’s just a memory from many years past.