[Bruce Litton]

In the late 1970's, I fished the flats as Mercer County Lake began to fill. At the time, acres of shallows about two feet deep, and I waded, tossing topwaters, catching largemouths and pickerel. Back in those days, I fished a lot with J.B. Kasper, who I met at Baker's Basin Pond by the canal when I was 14. Since I fished all the time, he too, we started swapping knowledge. He has stories of good catches from Whitehead Pond in Trenton (Assunpink dammed), but by the time I knew him, that was pretty much all over, except for the carp. They used to stock the Assunpink only with brook trout, and some of these ran up the Little Shabakunk (confluence a little way upstream of the canal past the Basin, just below where the LS flows under canal). When I was 10, I fished Little Shabakunk obsessively, catching some of these trout a mile or more upstream of the Assunpink.