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A tip of the hat to 2025

There’s still a few days left in 2025, and it was another year of memorable moments for the Mahoning Valley. So with it being the last weekend before the calendar turns to 2026, a couple of the notable high school seasons should be acknowledged. There were plenty to pick from, especially with the divisions expanding in boys and girls basketball, baseball and softball. So if your team isn’t on the list, it’s not a knock on their season, but I think these are the top stories. Let’s start with winter sports. Girls basketball saw a trio of young teams make it to the regional ...

Shenango Lake is home to great fishing and plenty of memories

On this Saturday after Christmas, as we close out another fantastic fishing season, I reflect back through the misty years and see the jolliest of anglers happily sharing some of his favorite spots on a lake I have grown to love. The life of a fishing writer includes some stark realities (ha ha). Editors demand exciting stories that require many days of grueling research on unfamiliar waters trying new tactics. It isn’t easy, but somebody has to do it. So it was that warm Saturday more than 40 years ago when I teamed up with the late Bob Mullen and his son, Dale, at Shenango Lake ...

Riffle to compete in kayak championship

Competitive bass anglers are well known to have a hankering for metal-flaked boats with mega-horsepower engines, but an angler from nearby Uniontown has punched his ticket for the biggest stage in the sport by fishing from a kayak. Brandon Riffle, a Portage County deputy sheriff, will compete in this spring’s Bassmaster Kayak Series Championship on Chickamauga and Nickajack lakes thanks to winning the Ohio Kayak Fishing Angler of the Year honors. En route to the title, he won the circuit’s Salt Fork tournament. Riffle will join five other Ohioans in the March 11-13 ...

Don’t duck Pymatuning

A popular weekend experience for northeastern Ohioans and western Pennsylvanians is visiting the Pymatuning Reservoir spillway in Linesville, Pa., to feed the churning school of carp as ducks walk across their backs. While Pymatuning is famous for its carp-feeding entertainment, that is but one small piece of the lake’s fishy entertainment. Walleye, bass, crappies and muskies thrive in the reservoir straddling the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, and attract thousands of anglers every year. My experience at Pymatuning dates back to 1980, when the editor of Ohio Fisherman magazine asked ...

The wonders of West Branch Reservoir

My first West Branch Reservoir fishing trip ended with our boat 15 pounds lighter than it was when we left the dock that morning. Looking back on that fine spring day in 1977, I recognize how unfamiliar I was with the ways of reservoir fishing. I knew, based on reading, that 90% of the fish live in 10% of the water. But little did I know the fraction of suitable bass and crappie habitat was defined by cover. Cover includes stumps, and so it was that day in May more than 40 years ago that I got up close and personal with one of the numerous stumps on the bottom of West Branch ...

Second chance gave Lake Milton new life

One sunny morning more than a few years ago on Lake Milton, I spotted a surface commotion that begged for investigation. As the Bass Cat glided toward the splashes and ripples, I recognized the source of the fuss. It was a 6-inch smallmouth bass with a 5-inch yellow perch in its mouth. The bass and the perch were in a predicament. The smallie obviously bit off more than it could swallow, and the perch was too far into the bass’s mouth to wiggle free. It was a stalemate in the truest sense of the word. Both fish were doomed to die that day, either from exhaustion resulting from ...