Typically, when I fish the neighborhood ponds by my house, I go to a specific pond first. It’s no secret, and in a well foot-trafficked area. It sits just beyond the chain link fence of a youth baseball diamond and within spitting distance of a jungle gym, not that you’d actually find yourself spitting at it.
It’s been quite good to me over the years. Most of the posts tagged “Neighborhood Ponds” have referenced events that have taken place there. It also happens to have tons of bluegill and a bunch of microbass™; you might even catch one or two of pretty nice size if you piss them off enough to take your fly.
Well, I went to visit on Sunday night and after stringing up my fly rod all I found was a bunch of turtles. The pond was literally filled to the brim with turtles. Shall I say it was infested with turtles? Resembling an orgy scene from Caligula, I’ve never seen so many turtles stacked up in one place outside of a herpetarium… or a pizzeria.
And these turtles certainly were persistent. I’m not sure if it’s a character trait of (what looked like mostly) Florida softshell turtles, but they’d follow you around the pond’s perimeter in a flotilla resembling a wolfpack of Somali pirates. And should you momentarily shake them long enough to make a cast, they and their pointy noses would immediately be back on your nine as soon as your fly hit the water. Assholes.
I think the final straw was when one scumbag of a turtle zoomed in from oh, 30 feet away, with the sole intention of getting entangled in my Rio Gold and impaled in the left rear flipper by a now errant BoogleBug. That fight was a moment of chaos, bending my fiberglass rod down into the cork. It may have even elicited a satisfyingly perverse grin until I voluntarily broke off the tippet. Enough of that shit.
“But, Mike, how can you be so mean spirited toward the turtles. You were intruding their space?”
Shut up you damn hippie.
Anyway, I take no pleasure in reporting that it wasn’t tons of fun casting at a bunch of typically braindead bluegill through a gauntlet of unhinged turtles, (even the one recently pierced). And sadly, when it’s 90-something degrees with 90% humidity, there is no solace found in “just being outdoors.” Curious, can one even consider a man-made retention pond located in an overly manicured residential area “outdoors”?
Oh well, I guess you gotta smoke ’em if you got ’em. Just fuck the damn turtles.
Good one. Had to laugh at the last line.
Thanks. A little unconventional fishing report, but I was writing from the heart…