Captain Anthony Awgul took my dad and I out on Lake Nockamixon to go punching for bass – one of the many techniques that he uses to catch fish on this popular Philadelphia lake that is notorious for holding, and being difficult to catch, big bass. We grabbed breakfast at the Roy Ann Diner in Sellersville and met Anthony at the Tohickon Boat Launch around mid-day for a couple hours of fishing.

Punching is a technique for dropping a lure through a thick bed of weeds in a weedless setup with heavy braided line strong enough to pull back any weeds that you catch along the way. Hopefully you hook into a big bass before you get stuck in the weeds, and if you don’t catch one in the spot where you land the bait you real your weeds back in as fast as you can so that you can remove the weeds and toss it right back in to the chaos in the shallows of the lake.

I was big into fishing when I grew up, but I had never heard of punching and certainly never purposely through a lure into the middle of the weeds expecting to be able to catch a fish somewhere like Nockamixon.

Nockamixon is a large man-made lake that was formed in the early 1970s when the state built a dam on Tohickon Creek, flooding Tohickon Village and creating the lake at the heart of what is now Nockamixon State Park in Bucks County.

Lake Nockamixon is classified by Pennsylvania as a Big Bass Lake. A big bass lake has a minimum length of 15 inches for harvested fish outside of the catch and release only season in late spring / early summer. The theory is that the fish get a chance to grow larger before they are caught and removed from the lake.

The bass really don’t have anything to fear from me at Nockamixon though, as I don’t think I have ever caught a fish worth keeping there, and most of the time my dad and I practice catch and release anyway (frequently letting the fish off the hook before we manage to land them anyway!) With all of the fishing pressure on the lake, those bass probably see more lures then I do!

Unlike me, Anthony knows how to fish. If you have seen Anthony’s facebook page, he and his clients catch a serious amount of bass and have the photographs to prove it. It was his facebook page that led me to decide to take my dad out for a trip guided by Anthony to see if we could catch some of these elusive Nockamixon bass.

It was a beautiful day on the lake, sunny and warm but not too hot. We tossed our lures, caught our weeds, but unfortunately no trophy bass were caught and I didn’t happen to catch any. The total of my efforts of repeatedly tossing that bait was to watch a bass scream up to the surface to take a nip at it near the boat but not get the hook. Anthony and I both saw the bass flash at my lure, so for me it was almost as good as putting it in the boat.

I headed for home in the late afternoon to put in a little work (one of the joys of both being your own boss and working remotely) dreaming about the one that got away and ready for the next opportunity to catch a bass in Lake Nockamixon near Quakertown.

Thanks Anthony for showing us how to catch them and putting us where the fish are!

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