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"A River Revival" (Guest Article)
From the manuscript Philadelphia On The Fly
by Ron Swegman

The great blue heron stood on a boulder below the falls of the Water Works like a fisherman dressed in faded denim. As tall as a small man, the bird lifted one of its slender legs and took a slow, careful step over the swift currents flowing between the stones. Like me, this angler preferred to fish during low tide, the time when the river allowed itself to be read.

I dismounted from my mountain bike and locked it onto the guardrail along the bike path. Instead of hoisting myself over, I slipped through, so I would not disturb the bird until I had at least snapped a photo. Herons are solitary, fishing birds, and like most fishermen spook at the slightest sign of an approach.

I crouched behind a patch of blooming purple thistle and white Queen Anne's lace and snapped two photos. I felt like an intruder in one respect because to reach the water I would have to stand and climb down the rocks on the hillside directly above the bird's bankside perch. I watched it watching all until the urge to fish returned to me. I stood, it took off, and after a few slow-motion flaps of its wide wings it glided over the water to an another outcrop of rocks in the middle of the river.

The Saturday morning sun was already high and bright and hot. The light and heat baked the boulders dry moments after they had emerged from the receding tide. I made my way along the bank, over and around the stones, and stopped thirty yards downriver where a large catalpa tree spread itself over the river. A fat lead sinker hung from a length of monofilament off one of the tree's middle branches. It made strangely compatible company with the catalpa's green bean seedpods. The weight served also as a warning; my casts would have to be precise and low to the water.

The tree's shade cooled the back of my neck, and the shifting patterns of light and dark on the drying stones reflected the liquid clarity of the early morning air. This was the spot. Here, beneath this tree, was a crescent-shaped eddy about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. A broken trail of foam wound its way toward me in a slow, clockwise motion that lead back to the main channel flowing on my left: a quiet area full of food for feeding fish.

I assembled rod, reel, line, and leader and positioned myself behind the cover of a waist-high boulder that broke the current at the head of the eddy. This spot contained the textbook conditions for smallmouth bass, so, I tied on a large Olive Woolly Bugger and cast it toward the tail end where two rocks, dark and damp, stuck out from the busy surface.

My retrieve commenced as soon as the wet fly hit the water. Bass often strike out of reflex, and a dead fly is just another bit of flotsam going by on the river as far as this particular species of game fish is concerned. The most important thing for a river bass angler to do, after an accurate cast to a spot that may hold fish, is to make the lure look alive.

The retrieve was slow and steady, a regular rhythm that allowed my concentration to appreciate the tower of City Hall and its colossal bronze statue of William Penn rising with the rest of the Philadelphia skyline in the distance. The fact that I could fish for smallmouth bass, the silver medallist on the freshwater fly fisher's podium, and that I could do so so close to the city, was an epiphany of sorts. The Schuylkill River and its ecosystem, once polluted and near death, had endured and transcended the burden of sins placed into it for the sake of industrial, urban, American development. And here, for one citizen of Philadelphia, was the proverbial silver lining.

A sharp tug brought my full attention back to the river. I raised my rod and felt living weight. This was not a rock snag. My floating yellow fly line became straight as the taker sounded into the channel on my left and began working with the current, which instantly doubled the weight bending my fly rod --

Fish on line!

I lifted both arms above my head and held my rod parallel to the river to let the fish take as much line as it wanted. Twenty feet later, it curved back toward me. I quickly took in the slackening line, raised my rod to a 90-degree angle. The fish felt my presence leading it off course, and it took off a second time. Two sharp tugs forced me down with my rod. The water broke, and a healthy smallmouth bass danced on the river within a shower of sun bright droplets.

The bass further complicated my catching it by sounding again toward the submerged rocks along the bottom. It sped behind the river side of the waist-high boulder. Fine tippet material frays easily on these rough chunks of stone, and the bass perhaps knew this from previous experience. I leaned over the rock and could see down to the length of it, head yanking hard in both directions, doing its best to shake the hook and get under cover.

The fish was tiring now, enough to let one arm hold both rod and bass at bay while I unhooked my catch-and-release net from a loop on my fishing vest. I stood back, crouched down, and lead it over toward the mouth of the net. Not quite! It made one last dash of about six or seven feet before turning over enough to allow me to net it.

I took a quick photo of the fish spread out on the wet black mesh of the net, then lip-lifted it to unhook the fly. Thumbing the bottom lip and holding the fish face up and vertical can calm bass. I did this, and the bass relaxed, but I was upset to see the sight of blood. The hook of my fly had set inside its mouth, beside the fish's tongue, and it must have hit one of the tiny arteries in and around its gills. I used my forceps to remove the fly quickly and cleanly, but when I placed the bass back into the slow water along the bank of the eddy a small, translucent cloud of blood puffed out of the fish's mouth and dispersed with the current. The fish floated up and turned on its side.

I have always practiced catch-and-release as a golden rule, and have always prided myself on quick, clean releases of my catch, but this fish was in trouble. It had lost blood and had gone into shock.

This was early July -- bass season -- so it was legal to keep the fish if it was at least a foot long. I quickly measured the bass from head to tail: eleven inches. I was now, for the first time, honestly facing the ethics of angling.

I decided I was neither going to keep nor give up on this beautiful bass. I began to do what I knew I could do. I first had to get the fish breathing again before its heart stopped. I righted it, turned it around, and holding it with both hands, placed it face first into the current. This way water could pass through and aerate its gills. I pushed it forward and back, too, the equivalent of fish CPR.

Two or three minutes of this action brought positive results. The bass would no longer list in the water, and its gill flaps opened and closed, albeit slowly. I next lowered it to the bottom, to a depth of two feet. The added water pressure helped the bass regain its equilibrium. I let it go and the fish held itself steady on the bottom. Its full, mottled bronze coloration had returned.

"We're two thirds of the way there!" I said.

The third and final phase of recovery involved a combination of everything I had done up to that point, plus facing it back into the full force of the main current. I guided the fish underwater around some submerged stones into a swift, narrow channel flowing behind the big boulder and rocked it back and forth along the bottom. I did this for another minute before leading the bass back to the head of the eddy where it first hit. I let go, and this time the fish bolted forward into the deep water, tired, but certainly strong and vigorous enough to fend for itself once again.

I took a break and walked back with my camera toward the falls where another angler had since taken up a position. He was drifting minnows beneath a float for channel catfish.

"Any luck?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.