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Spider Rybaak holding
a brook trout. |
The latest line on fishing
By Fred LeBrun
There’s never been a lack of advice in print on where or how
to fish in the Adirondacks. The earliest travel guides freely offered
opinions on the subject, mostly effusing over the native brook trout
in ponds and streams.
Over the years, influential books have been written on the subject
as well, from the legendary Ray Bergman’s Trout,
first published in the 1930s during the tail-end of the golden age,
to Fran Betters’s more contemporary and charming Fishing
in the Adirondacks. In recent years we’ve seen a spate
of guides with a broader view of Adirondack angling, departing from
the focus on trout and a few well-known waters. Notable among these
is Good Fishing in the Adirondacks, edited by Dennis Aprill
(Countryman Press) and still in print.
But the best yet in terms of depth and breadth of helpful coverage
is the newly published Fishing Eastern New York by Spider
Rybaak, a Falcon Guide from Globe Pequot Press. Nearly 200 pages
pertain directly and in detail to the Adirondacks, offering information
about stocking, best places to fish and for what species, access
points, routes, tips on lures or flies, and in general what to expect.
A particularly useful feature of Rybaak’s guidebook is the
list of Additional Information for each place. Here you’ll
learn when fishing derbies happen nearby, where to rent a boat,
or the best place for a campsite. It’s especially helpful
for the traveling fisherman.
With an enthusiastic and peppery writing style, Spider describes
many smaller streams and little-known ponds that haven’t seen
this sort of exposure before. Which is not to suggest that these
places aren’t well-known to legions of fishermen in the North
Country, and for generations.
What kind of a name is Spider anyway, and who is this guy offering
the advice?
“I’m 6-foot-5, and I used to be skinny,” says
the 55-year-old Syracuse resident. ”You figure it out.”
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Fishing Eastern New York
By Spider Rybaak
Globe Pequot Press, 2003
Softcover, 346 pages, $16.95 |
His parents were Ukrainians who survived years
of Nazi slave labor camps and avoided the same fate under Stalin
by emigrating to western New York. Raymond Peter Hrynyk Rybaak’s
earliest memories are of bank fishing on weekends with his father—a
smelter in a foundry—on the Oswego and Seneca rivers, while
his mother, in a wheelchair, watched from shore.
“I learned so much from him, about patience. Those were the
most pleasant times I can remember. The river was my wishing well.
We were so poor, I can’t tell you how poor we were. Believe
me, we didn’t just fish for fun.”
What fascinated his father were northern pike. That’s what
he wanted to catch, and sometimes he did. “My mother would
remove the skin, pickle them and make a sort of meatloaf from the
fish. It was great.”
Spider was the only one of three brothers who shared his father’s
fervor for fishing. After a stint in the Army, he went to Syracuse
University on the G.I Bill and earned a degree in English, becoming
the first college graduate in his family. For the last 15 years
he’s been doing OK as a free-lance outdoor writer.
Why his background matters is simple enough: We can never escape
our roots, nor frankly, should we. When Spider plunged into a couple
of years of intensive touring and fishing for this book, he was
inevitably attracted to northern pike. Even though he is an accomplished
fly fisherman who has pursued trout avidly, when he hit river after
pond after lake and discovered that these giant predator fish were
everywhere in the Adirondacks, he went with the flow.
Consequently if there is one species that gets far more attention
than any other in this book, it’s the northern pike. It’s
probably well-deserved. Bass and pike are taking over more and more
of Adirondack waters. “Rivers, regions evolve,” says
Spider “The bigger lakes in the Adirondacks are no longer
the natural fisheries they once were. They’re constantly changing.”
Ill-conceived stocking programs have contributed, and so has illegal
dumping of bass, pike and so-called trash fish in many waters that
shouldn’t have them. So now we find northern pike and both
largemouth and smallmouth bass dominating places that were once
the exclusive haunts of brookies and their bigger cousins, the lake
trout.
Because of his background, Spider does not see the intrusive northern
pike as a less virtuous fish. To the contrary, he offers us spirited
advice as to where the biggest northerns are ripe for the picking.
“Right now I’d say the Upper and Lower Chateaugay Lakes
have monster northerns in them, 40 inches or better. Another great
place is Raquette Lake. When I was a kid, we’d go fishing
for brookies in that lake,” he says. “There are still
some brookies there, but the fish to go for now are really big largemouth
bass.”
Spider says he has fished 95% of the 170 Adirondack waters cataloged
in his book. “With the ponds, I’d fish one, and then
hike to the next, and keep on going. I had a lot of help from DEC
biologists, but I can assure you, I did the fishing.”
He has visited all corners of the fishable Adirondacks. His first
Adirondack entry is for Lake George, with six specific locations
discussed along with different species to fish for, at different
times of year. His last entry is a one-mile, fast-water drift out
of Hinckley Reservoir at the western boundary of the Park. In between,
he covers the entire Fulton Chain, among other lakes, most of the
major and minor canoe routes, and scads of ponds. Just west of Upper
Saranac Lake, for example, Spider describes separate fishing strategies
for Rollins, West Pine, East Pine, Floodwood, Polliwog, Black, Fish
Creek, Little Square, Horsehoe, Follensby Clear and Green ponds.
The short of it is if you have the urge for a combination hiking-fishing
excursion into the Adirondack interior, this is the book to have.
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