The benefit of having a rope to hang onto when you come to this ever widening chasm of mud becomes self evident for the shore fishermen that frequent this discharge. You will no longer make it past this point unless you have the jumping skills of a monkey. I have a feeling there is an anal retentive, problem solving ex-marine to thank for this device. The knots are too perfectly done and spaced to have been done by anyone else.
The benefit of this rope also becomes self evident to the wading fisherman that knows walking up on this clear water discharge from above will spook any catchable fish sitting on the edge between the discharge and the river. Always better to get in the river well above or below stream and stalk up to it at river level to increase your odds and to make those initial casts. This rope eases the 4 foot drop to the river far enough down stream.
Unless your fingers are numb from the cold as you grab onto the rope, slip down the slope hard, landing on knees in mud and sliding fast down hill, pivoting forward and banging your chest into the same muddy slope while your ever tightening grip on the rope is proved pointless since this part of the rope is covered in mud. As you stand up glad that you didn't continue to slide into the river on your stomach, you see a pool of red in the water at your feet and one of your fingers suddenly seems awfully warm. You find that your acrobatics has damn near torn off half your fingernail and even though you think twice about washing it in treatment plant outflow, you do it anyway.
That's why God made peroxide.
Then the rope is pretty much useless and you're better off getting in about 10 feet to the south where none of that will happen.
I got to the outflow about a minute after a couple of shore fishermen got to the other side. They hurried to get lines in the water before me. They were using minnows. I decided to just sit on the opposite shore and finish my cheap cigar. I waved and just sat and watched for awhile. I have a feeling I was making them uncomfortable. They caught nothing in ten minutes. With minnows they should have had a few on in that time frame. Told me that it was going to be a little tough fishing.
I wandered off down stream. The outflow wasn't as crystal clear as usual, but after some rain and melting snow, it tends to muddy up a little. Part of the outflow is discharge from the Caterpillar plant about a half mile away and that's where the mud comes from.
I swam a jig and twister from tight along the shore to where the warmer water met the river about 20 feet out. I paid particularly close attention to getting it as tight as possible to the shore line root balls. This paid off with a little dink smallie within the first 150 feet.
I thought this was a good sign, but that one fish wound up being a stray that had no one else to hang out with. A lot of hiking down stream got me a couple of quick release foul hooked carp, but that was about it.
At the end of an area called the flats is an overhanging tree. Just up stream of it by a few feet is a huge log that has been sitting along the shore for years. It has started to collect other logs directly out in front of the over hanging tree. This is creating a nice current break and pool. Directly under the overhang is the deepest spot along this shore and the warm water from the discharge can still be felt. Today with the water up the hole would probably come close to 5 feet deep. The biggest smallie I've seen taken from this hole was 21 inches. That was a number of years ago. This spot is always worth a cast.
Today the best I could do was one 14 inch smallie.
By then I was cold and getting bored. The river was flowing at almost 2000 cubic feet per second, which tends to push the warm water of the outflow tight to shore, and by the time it makes it past the flats to the bend, it's hard to feel the warmer water. Areas worth spending time fishing were quickly disappearing.
At normal winter levels, which is generally a flow of about 600 cfs, this corner gets a good part of the warm discharge water and it just sits there.
Fishing around all the lay downs and branches and casting tight to the root balls far back along the shore is usually worth the effort. Today it was the end of my efforts and a signal to go home.
Wandering back on shore I came across a big maple tree with a split down one side. This usually means that at some point it was hit by lightning and was able to heal itself. The wound never seems to take on the color of the rest of the tree again. This one had remnants of poison ivy vines that had grown and died and left their impressions in the newer bark of the split.
By the time I was back to the car my back was screaming in pain and my fingertips were numb. I'm out of shape. Too many months sitting idle in front of computers and too many cold days that make it not worth going out. For me any way.
I hate the cold. The snow too. Always have. But that's a different story.
