The Greatest Fishing Day Ever!

As regular readers of my blog know, my dad was a very avid fisherman. Whenever he had a day off, he usually went fishing. When we had our summer vacations however, he could not join my brother and my mom during the week, as vacation slots were determined by seniority. Here was a guy with like 8 weeks of vacation, but he never had one in the summer!
This one summer, we were on vacation again in the Catskill Region of New York state, in a town called Hunter. We stayed at a house which could hold 4-5 families or so, with some shared kitchens.
The Schoharie creek ran in the backyard, and my younger brother and I spent countless hours on the creek, fishing, swimming, and catching minnows and crayfish for use as bait .

When my father came up on the weekends,it would be non stop fishing the whole weekend. His fishing partner, Andrew, from my blog story "Andrew Rode the Boat Ashore", spent his entire summer staying at this house , so he of course would join my father and I on any fishing trips.

This particular summer was a very dry one and the drought had really taken a toll on the Schoharie Reservoir

where we were headed that day. The creek of the same name flowed for miles, eventually ending up at this huge reservoir which was probably 15-20 miles from where we were staying. The minnows I caught on the creek were so fragile, that we would stop at least 2 times on the way to the reservoir, to change the water in the minnow bucket.
When we finally made it to the water, after winding our way thru the forest path, we were all astonished at how low the water level was.There were only a few "ponds" of water here and there where the remaining waters had collected.
We quickly got our poles ready and began to fish. You've heard the expression of "shooting fish in a barrel". Well, this was hooking fish in a barrel. With virtually every cast in the water, regardless of what bait was used, a fish of some type was after it! We started to pull in walleyes, pickerel, perch, bass, crappies, and sunfish. It was a feeding frenzy! At one point, I had lost my bait  and was reeling my pole in when a fish struck at my line, because there was a small flashy metal blade that went with the hook!

Within  less than an hour, the three of us hauled in over 50 fish of all sizes and shapes. We would have caught more, but got lackadaisical when reeling them in and lost more than we would have on a normal fishing day!
Our success no doubt, was because the fish population, which was normally spread out over miles of water, were now crowded into some pretty small pockets of water.

With 50 fish caught in about an hours time, we decided to call it a day. We hauled the heavy load of fish back to the car and once we got back to our vacation house, gutted and cleaned all of them and boasted to anyone who would listen, about the greatest fishing day ever!