The opening day of bass season is Saturday in Pennsylvania. With 86,000 miles of rivers and streams as well as 4,000 lakes and reservoirs Pennsylvania offers bass anglers many opportunities to fish for largemouth, smallmouth and striped bass. Bass anglers are second only to the trout anglers for fishing interest in commonwealth waters.

Butler County anglers have great opportunities with Lake Arthur, Keystone Lake and the Allegheny River right in our backyards. With a little more of a drive we can find the Shenango Reservoir and Lake Wilhelm in Sandy Lake.

My favorite locations to fish for bass have been farm ponds, local strip mine ponds and the smaller creeks and streams that feed into the rivers.

Likely you will find largemouth bass in the ponds and smallmouth bass in the rivers. There is no set rule for either species, but there are preferred habitats.

One of my favorite fishing spots was right in a city park that had a small acre or two pond with a fountain. If you cast a plug near the edge of the fountain spray you could expect a good rap from the resident bass. Of course I practiced catch and release of these bass and had many hours of enjoyable recreation.

The best location for bass fishing when I was a kid was at old Norm Earhart’s’ farm pond. We used live bait mainly worms and crickets or grasshoppers to entice the behemoth bass from the deep end of the pond.

I took a drive back that way a year or two ago and I could see that it was long gone filled in for a development. A shame for kids wanting to fish a great pond but a nice neighborhood now.

If I was to develop a community setting I would include a small fishing pond for kids and families to recreate in on a convenient basis. Concerns for liabilities and litigations make people nervous about fishing spots.

One of my best days ever fishing for bass was entirely by accident on Lake Erie. Lake Erie is a world class smallmouth bass fishing destination. Not being part of the B.A.S.S. Anglers circuit I didn’t pay it much mind and was seeking yellow perch and the stray walleye or two. I was with Sim and Mark Grossman and I knew that the boat captain Sim was a dedicated walleye angler. As for myself I am truly an opportunist and like to take advantage of the best available game fish.

We were fishing off the PGC launch at Safe Harbor near the New York side of Erie. The walleye fishing slowed down and we decided to hit the perch. Mark and I had procured a nice bucket of minnows and started to cast out and drift over some structure. It was the perfect set up for some jumbo schooling smallies. A 5- or 6-pound smallmouth is an awesome hit on regular tackle and they sure liked those minnows. We had caught and released about a dozen bass apiece and were really whooping it up. Sim looked over at us like only a true walleye angler could and asked us if we were ready to try another place. Our answer was heavens no! This was great fishing and it was like nothing else we had experienced anywhere else in Pennsylvania waters.

Sim asked us to wind it up and get ready to try a new place again and we ignored him and kept fishing for those voracious bass. Pretty soon Sim reached over and grabbed up our bucket of minnows and tossed them into the lake. We watched in astonishment as our number one bass bait filtered down into the depths.

The fishing turned off for us and off we went looking for walleye. It took us a few minutes to absorb what had happened and we both said to Sim, “That was an awesome feeding frenzy and the bass were world class!”

He looked at us and said, “Buy yourself a bass boat. This is a walleye boat!”

We still aren’t over that day and when he promises to fish for anything but walleye we still doubt him. This weekend was Sim’s 75th birthday and his family had a fish-themed party for him.

Dang if those sugar cookies weren’t made to look like a walleye!

Until we meet again hang on to your minnow bucket and may all you Dads have a great Father’s Day!

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle.