“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”
George S. Patton
Most reading this are undoubtedly familiar with the movie, Saving Private Ryan. The movie’s blockbuster sales and ratings seemed to indicate how good it was, but the A minus grade given by one audience of American WWII veterans who participated in the D-Day invasion is even more telling as to its realism.
While there are several themes playing in the movie, a haunting line towards its end – perhaps the thesis of the movie – is what was on my mind as I nymphed a stretch of Balls Eddy on a beautiful Memorial Day.
The West Branch at Balls Eddy…
This tradition of fishing has been something I’ve been doing for a number of years. There’s an old cemetery adjacent to the Balls Eddy fishing access and it is at that cemetery where I first witnessed a solemn and heartbreaking tribute to those who paid the ultimate price. The place is a simple rectangle of fertile river bottom, walled in fieldstone. There are a few trees there and the graves are adorned with flags, the lawn neatly cut. It is a peaceful place. On that past Memorial Day, the sky was blue, the birds sang sweetly, and the river ran by in hues of blue.
Hallowed ground…
I was on the river and fishing by 8:30 a.m., and at exactly 9:05, heard the volley of shots that marked the day. They crackled through the river valley, then came round again in echo until the sound of the rushing water of the riffle finally silenced them. A few drifts of my nymph rig through the ‘rainbow’s den’, as I call it, resulted in my indicator plunging down in the fast water, the hook set, and a rainbow trout that leaped repeatedly and then made spastic runs in the heavy current. The flash of this fish, its strength, its athleticism made me feel good. After landing it and releasing it, I sat down, watched the river, and remembered the movie.
At the end of Saving Private Ryan, the now-elderly Ryan is seen visiting the grave of Captain Miller, the Army Ranger officer who led the mission to bring the young Private home after all of his brothers had been killed in combat. Ryan pays tribute to Captain Miller with the following:
“My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel coming back here. Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. And I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”
Earlier in the movie, with Captain Miller slowly dying from wounds received while defending a critical bridge crossing, Ryan hears Captain Miller’s last words:
James… earn this. Earn it.
“James, earn this, earn it”
As I listened to the rush of the river and the wind in the trees, I came to the realization that Memorial Day is more than just honoring the fallen – it’s about remembering the dead by celebrating life in a way that honors those words so simply spoken by Captain Miller. In this country, we are free to choose how to live our lives. That freedom was bought with blood, their blood. In getting up early and going fly fishing – in doing good things – in living life the best we can, we earn it, and by doing that we remember them for their great sacrifice.
Grippen Pond sits a mere 50 yards off my back deck and is, at last, reborn. I thought about making that call last year, after hooking and losing a nice bass and following that with a 15″ rainbow trout (a first ever for me in the pond and most likely a holdover from a neighbor’s stocking), but for the rest of the year, the pond just didn’t fish like it used to, especially in summer and fall. My first saunter back to it on an early evening this year convinced me otherwise and left me grinning and looking forward to times like the good old days.
The first bass of 2018…
After moving my family into a bigger house in 1998, I did a recon of the pond on which we had frontage and deeded recreational access and found it teeming with small sunfish and frogs. Weedy and mucky, the pond looked old. Locals claimed it was once a place where kids swam, and dairy cows drank cool spring water…
Ponds, like us fishermen, grow old and eventually die. The life of any pond will pass through 3 phases: 1) Oligotrophic, 2) Mesotrophic, and finally, 3) Eutrophic. Broome County Soil & Water Conservation surveyed the pond years back and confirmed it was old and dying. The only way to rejuvenate it effectively, according to them, would be to drain it and excavate. Early on (we’re talking pre-1900), the pond was quite possibly Oligotrophic: deep and clear and having a low concentration of nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Over time, keeping in mind it was on land that became a dairy farm, the pond transitioned to the Mesotrophic stage: having more nutrients and, therefore, more plant and algae growth. As a result of the plant and algae growth, the bottom of the pond began to fill in with organic material. The substrate that was once rock, sand, or gravel, now would have consisted of mud on top of the rocks. Gradually, Grippen Pond became Eutrophic as it is today – extremely well nourished with nitrogen and phosphorus, leading to an abundance of aquatic plant growth. The bottom of the pond is now filled with organic sediment and mud – I’ve waded in areas were I sank in up to my knees. In the heat of summer, vast mats of aquatic weeds and duckweed give the bass a shady hiding place, safe from the herons that hunt the pond’s shallows. The depth of the pond at its deepest point is over 10 feet but I am sure it continues to fill in as all of that aquatic vegetation dies each year. As the pond or lake fills in and weed growth accelerates, the total open water area will shrink. Eventually, Grippen Pond is destined to be a swamp or wetland without intervention.
In 1998 it was evident that Grippen Pond lacked a population of bass to control the sunfish population and I decided to attempt to balance out the situation by playing bucket biologist, stocking some bass from a coworker’s pond.
Scroll forward a few years and the bass were alive and growing…
Years back, a bright, beautifully marked, largemouth bass
Unbeknownst to me, however, my neighbor on the other side of the pond and owner of the pond, was doing his own stocking. Fathead minnows, crappie, largemouth bass, and rainbow trout were apparently planted almost every year. He had good intentions, but the rainbow trout certainly wouldn’t survive the warm water of the pond, especially through summer, though I now know at least one did. Quite possibly, the deep part of the pond has cold springs that allow a few to survive. I’ve never caught crappie, but I have caught some supersized sunfish that took bass-sized poppers and wooly buggers with mouths big enough to lip.
Big enough to take a bass popper…
The big male pumpkinseed sunfish in the picture above eventually met a far worse fate than being caught and released by yours truly. The winter of 2014 – 2015 was not kind to Grippen Pond as the Southern Tier of NY was hit with incredibly cold weather. On the way to work one morning I measured a low temperature of -27 degrees F! The arctic environment sealed the pond shut with a thick layer of ice that lasted well into April. And on top of the ice, the winter’s snow layered up into a very heavy coat.
These conditions can set up ponds, especially shallow ones, for “winter kills”. A winter kill occurs when the ice cover cuts off oxygenation of the water and then snow cover on the ice cuts out sunlight to aquatic plants, causing them to die. The dead plants, in turn, use even more oxygen as they decompose: a deadly downward spiral for all aquatic life.
And so that spring of 2015 was a rough one. I remember scanning the shoreline from my kayak, finding hundreds of sunfish, good numbers of bass, and a few very large grass carp, all dead. Spring turned to summer and the pond was unusually quiet. Gone were the sounds of bass crashing bait in the shallows in the evening. Gone too were the toilet bowl flush swirls at any popper tossed close to a weed edge.
A very large grass carp that took, of all things, a chartreuse bass popper! I caught this monster in May of 2014 – the spring before the winter kill. It towed me around the pond in my kayak for quite a while…
After a disappointing 2015, I once again patrolled the pond in the spring of 2016, hoping to see signs of a comeback. Paddling about in my kayak, the pond’s owner, a friendly, elderly neighbor, came out of his house to talk to me one evening. I told him the 2015 winter kill had eliminated the bass and large sunfish and that the pond was overrun by small sunfish and frogs. Tadpoles that spring overwhelmed the shallows.
My kayak ready for duty. The pond owner’s house is in the background. Grippen Pond is a good 1.5 acres in size in the shape of a distorted kidney bean.
My neighbor listened intently to my suggestion that we re-stock some bass and acted on it that year, adding a bunch of decent-size bass from another pond.
As a result of this re-establishment of the bass population, sunfish appear to be under control. And the tadpole population also seems to be thinning. I think I know just where most of those have been going…
Now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big rivers alone…
Norman Maclean – A River Runs Through It
He sat with his back to me as I stood behind him with a clipper and cut his hair. His skin was paper thin, stretched tight over his bald head and mottled with age spots. With each pass of the cutter, wisps of white hair, thinner than 7X tippet, fell to the floor. As I cut and trimmed, we talked, and part of me reached back to times when I was in his seat and he was standing in my place. Back then, the Sears trimmer was fitted with what I called “the claw.” The claw was fixed over the cutter blades, assuring an even crew cut. The process was easy – move from the base of the head, up and over, like shearing a sheep. I remember the trimmer snagging and pulling my hair on occasion and I would wince with each pass. And then there was the smell of 3 in 1 oil and the itch of hair falling down my neck.
My Dad, like the rest of my family, was not a fisherman. But Dad had a supplier salesman in business who loved fishing. Mr. Meehan, if I remember his name correctly, loved saltwater fishing. He was raised somewhere in the Big Apple and at one time drove a cab. Later in life, he got into sales but retained his cab-driving tendencies when he drove us around on business trips. I remember two trips – one to Belmar, for albacore and bonito – the other way out to Montauk for blues and stripers. Both were productive, especially for a young boy. I could barely handle the fish, be it big blues or fast running tuna, but oh did it set the hook even deeper into a life already infused with fishing.
Later in my life, Dad still did not fish, but he did participate. He was there for me, in a word. There is a story told by educator and author, Stephen Covey, where he interviews a father, who in an effort to understand and get closer to his son, decided to take a month off of work one summer with the goal to attend every major league game the team played away from home. Beyond time, this took a lot of money and painstaking preparation. On hearing of this, Covey commented to the father, “you sure must like baseball,” to which the man replied, “no, but I love my son.”
During my college years, my father purchased a center console 21′ Proline with a 140 hp outboard. My parents had bought a place on Barnegat Bay, and the boat was a wonderful extension to that home by the bay. In it, we fished the tidal estuaries, the channels, the cuts and holes, and the inlet. When we fished it was all me – baiting Dad’s fluke rigs, setting him up, tirelessly instructing him on how to bottom bounce the rig. He never mastered that fine art, but somehow the fluke didn’t care, and I’d spend more time netting his fish, releasing them, and rebaiting or rigging than ever tending to my own line. Just the same, it was enjoyable time spent together.
With the years, age played its hand. Dad sold the boat as it became too much for him to handle alone, and my time in the Navy and a subsequent civilian job in Texas meant less time to visit. Kids came, responsibilities mounted, and summer days on the bay dwindled to holiday visits that were too short for any serious fishing, though we still would go.
A great day of November bass fishing on the Miss Barnegat Light. I’m slightly left of center, holding up a 39-pound bass that won the pool that day.
Our last fishing trip together was in September of 2012. Dad was 83 then. I remember proposing the trip during a visit and as the words came, I automatically prepared myself for the normal response, an apologetic decline. But this time was different, a hesitant “yes.” “What time do we have to get up?’ came the question I knew was coming. Dad never liked getting up early. “The boat leaves at 7:30 but we’ll need to be there earlier to get a good spot on the rail. He sighed. “Ok, I’ll go…” he replied.
Dad did get up on time, though slowly. He could still walk but had to reply on props like countertops, tables and chair to get around. His balance had faded such that when he did walk, there was what us kids termed “the wing”, used as a counter to his stooping posture. We had collectively warned him in the prior years to get up and move, take a walk. The alternative, we insisted, would be a gradual decline in mobility, ending with a wheelchair.
We made our way out to Long Beach Island and turned left onto the boulevard that took us past the once quaint, now glamorous and overbuilt beach towns, starting humble but gaining with wealth-clad hubris along the way – Ship Bottom, Surf City, North Beach, Harvey Cedars, Loveladies, and finally Barnegat Light, where things turned back to a bit more of a blue-collar fishing town.
Old Barney – Barnegat Light
The boat we’d take, the Miss Barnegat Light, or the “Red Sled” to many who fished on her, sat stern-to at the dock, and the gangway was open. A few anglers had already taken up position along the rails, and we got ours – starboard quarter just where I liked it.
The Red Sled – Miss Barnegat Light
We got underway on time. The engines – twin Caterpillar turbocharged V-12 diesels, started with the deep roar of 2800 horsepower coming to life. We motored out of the slip and into the narrow channel that led up past more slips, a bait and gas station, the Coast Guard station, and finally Barnegat Light itself.
Dad always liked the ride out. It was a glorious morning – chilly enough to hint of the coming of Fall, the horizon rimmed in pre-dawn crimson. We huddled along with the other fishermen in the deckhouse. The air was filled with the optimism of fishermen. There is, I am convinced no greater hope in any gathering of human beings than this…
The trip out was a long one. We arrived at a patch of sea already populated with fishing boats. We motored slowly about in searching loops, the captain using his fish finder for something deep down – a lump, a mound, a distinguishing feature of the bottom. Fish are, after all, creatures aligned with structure. I once read of an experiment where bass were placed in a large glass tank of water, it’s bottom a white sheet, featureless and barren. The bass were observed to just swim around randomly. After some time, a different sheet was slid under the tank bottom – this time again white save a small black stripe. The bass were then observed to congregate around the black stripe. So, it is with fish.
We anchored up and with the boat’s horn as a signal, dropped our jigs down 90 feet, “baited” in hope. Jigging is a fun way to fish and when working a heavy jig deep, an exercise worthy of Popeye forearms. Soon enough rods could be seen doubled over with good bluefish in the 6 – 12 lb., range. The fish were ravenous. Yours truly started scoring as well…
Jigged up blues…
The good fishing lasted well into the afternoon. Dad had a fine time, sitting near me, taking pictures, and soaking up the abundant sun, though he complained about his legs being sore from the rocking motion of the boat.
That was the last I fished with my dad. He passed away on May 9, 2022, not long after retiring for the night but not before having his daily martini, extra dry with an olive and on the rocks.
A favorite picture of Dad, with my younger brother, David.
I still return to Barnegat, in late Spring to fly fish for stripers and blues, and then again in late Fall to try and catch the big striper migration south. Though my sister and her husband moved from Barnegat to a nice bayside home in Seaside Park about an hour away, it is different now, somehow lonely, as if my ties to this special place have worn and faded with time, the family cloth threadbare, a place first baptized with summer vacations, and then a place where my parents chose to retire to enjoy family gatherings, garnished with wonderful evening cocktails and bountiful seafood meals.
Now I fish alone and perhaps now too, I am haunted by waters…
“A bass is a far cry from the conventional target of the long rod. So when the conventional concepts of tackle, lures, and procedures fail to interest an unconventional quarry, go it his way”.
Tom Nixon, Largemouth Bass Fly Rodder
On my 2025 trip to our little place on Florida’s panhandle, I read William G. Tapply’s wonderful book of fly-fishing essays, “Every Day Was Special”, and came across a piece about an intriguing bass fly and its innovative creator, Tom Nixon. Just beyond me as I read and enjoyed a beer and cigar, lay Horseshoe Lake, a little sweet water jewel our Beachwalk townhouse is perched on.
The view from our place of Horseshoe Lake
In that water swim abundant baitfish, bluegills, and some truly impressive largemouth bass. While I had previously caught some nice largemouth bass in Horseshoe Lake, the more I read about Tom Nixon and his unique fly, the more I wanted to get my hands on it and give it a try. So, on my most recent visit, this past April, I did just that.
Nixon was a revolutionary in our sport, though, sadly, I doubt many fly fishers have ever heard of him. What I found researching the man, dare I say legend, is that he was born and schooled in Illinois, becoming an engineer, and eventually relocating to Lake Charles, Louisiana through his professional work for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. While working there, Nixon would spend most of his free time in a johnboat, armed with a fly rod in pursuit of big bass and panfish along the Calcasieu River and its many tributaries. And like any good engineer, he was constantly devising new fly patterns that might improve his success on that river.
Nixon literally wrote the book on fly fishing for bass and panfish. His seminal work, “Fly Tying and Fly Fishing for Bass and Panfish,” was first published in 1968, with a total of 3 editions thereafter. I was able to purchase a used copy – it is no longer available new in print.
The book grew from a request of Nixon in the early 1960s to teach fly fishing and fly tying to a group of boy scouts. Nixon tried to document all the various aspects of the sport he could think of, noting that most everything at the time was dedicated to cold-water trout and its flies. Failure to find sources to recommend to others led him to putting his notes into book form.
Fly fishing purists will likely not be fans of Nixon. His creations make use of spinners and plastics and all of this long before such things as the spoon fly ever took form in a vise. But Nixon’s creativity did not bother some of our sport’s greatest names. Lefty Kreh and Dave Whitlock are proud to have associated with Nixon over the years and reportedly fished his flies. Nixon was even invited as a tyer to the very first International Federation of Fly Fishers Show.
It used to be that bassing with a fly rod was wholly devoted to the popper. If bass were not taking topwater, one didn’t fish the fly rod for them. Streamers, crayfish patterns and other subsurface flies were not used for bass. That was, until the creation of the Calcasieu Pig Boat.
Nixon had friends who were into bass tournaments and used all sorts of conventional gear baits. He didn’t like getting out fished by his friends. “I was having to put up with a lot of guff from some of my heave and crank acquaintances about fly rod bass” he told William Tapply during an interview. Nixon wanted to develop a fly that would be as effective as some of the things they used. That’s how the “Pig Boat” was born, and it did prove to be one of the most effective bass flies ever developed. “Pig Boat” was the term used for German submarines in WW2, which were deadly at their ship-sinking craft. His favorite bass haunts were on the Calcasieu River in Louisiana – hence “The Calcasieu Pig Boat.”
Nixon’s creation first hit the water in early 1951. At that time, the Hawaiian Wiggler was one of the best bass lures around, and so he designed the Pig Boat to imitate the conventional lure. This fly most resembles the bass angler’s jig. Over the years, it’s not only taken thousands of bass, but it’s been equally deadly at times on brown trout, walleye and other species it was never intended for.
The Hawaiian Wiggler
The Pig Boat’s overall length is two to three inches long. Traditionally, the rubber hackle skirt and the head on a Pig Boat are black with the body, composed of extra-large chenille palmered with saddle hackles in any color you want it to be. Use extra-large chenille for the body. Medium size round rubber works best for the Pig Boat’s skirt. Four bunches of legs are tied in on the near side, top side, far side, and bottom of the hook. The head is built up out of thread, coated, and traditionally has an eye applied to it. Here’s a great YouTube video of tying this great fly.
This is a big bulky fly, so it’s appropriate to use an 8 or 9 weight rod to throw this with either a “big fly” weight-forward floating line or sink-tip line depending on the type and depth of water being fished. This fly is best fished using a strip-pause-strip-pause retrieve but it pays to also vary the type of retrieve depending upon the mood of the fish. Even though the Pig Boat was originally designed to catch big bass, it is also an effective saltwater fly. It’s reportedly been used to take big redfish in the Gulf among other species.
Over 25 years ago, when a local bass club invited Tom Nixon to participate in their tournaments on the Toledo Bend Reservoir, he accepted the chance to stack his fly rod up against their spinning and baitcasting gear. Nixon entered 5 tournaments and got one first, one second, and two third place finishes, and was disqualified from the fifth when his alarm failed to wake him in time for the start. Most of his bass were caught on just two flies – a spinner and Pig Boat rig and a yellow cork body popping bug.
Nixon fished late into his life, well into his 80’s and when he wasn’t fishing, he’d be giving programs or demonstrating his patterns at shows throughout the mid-South.
Tom Nixon and one of his spinner flies.
Nixon designed and tied many other patterns that are less well known than the pig boat, but also effective on bass and panfish, such as the .56%er, a deadly pattern for panfish…
The .56%er – picture courtesy of the Panfish on the Fly blog.
And so, during my recent 2026 visit, I decided to give the Calcasieu Pig Boat a try on the largemouth bass of Horseshoe Lake and adjoining ponds of the Sandestin Resort. I had purchased a bunch of Pig Boats in white and black/green color combinations. These flies sported a “mister twister” tail off the size 1 hook, something Nixon would have approved of – he was known to hang a pork rind tail off a pig boat at times and found it worked well.
A Sportsman’s Warehouse version of the Calcasieu Pig Boat
True to what I read, the pig boat performed admirably for me, tempting bass with its mass of undulating rubber legs and bulky body with the flash of chenille. I worked it in the shallows and around structure on an 8-weight floating line and sight fished it to bass staging to spawn. While I had fished a big Wooly Bugger to catch bass on previous trips, the Pig Boat has replaced the bugger as my go-to bass assassin pattern. I landed several very nice bass, including a personal best that taped out to roughly 23″.
The size 1/0 hook on this pig boat resulted in many more hookups as compared to a size 4 or 2 wooly bugger as well.
A prime example of the quality bass of Horseshoe Lake
In the end, fishing the Pig Boat on Horseshoe Lake felt like shaking hands across time, 75 years to be exact. Nixon built his flies for the dark water of the Calcasieu, but their spirit travels well — from the Louisiana bayous to a quiet Florida lake where a bass with shoulders made my day. Patterns come and go, but the good ones carry a piece of their maker with them. After this trip, I’m convinced the Pig Boat is one of those rare flies that still speaks clearly, decades after its creator set it loose. It now has a place in my box…
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