My love-hate relationship with Mosquito Lake dates back to 1977, the year I began to widen my fishing horizon to include waters beyond the reach of the casts I could make from the banks of creeks and ponds.

That was the year wife Barb and I went on a Saturday to Southern Park Mall to buy shoes and returned home with a brochure from one of the boat dealers displaying their gleaming fiberglass vessels in a spring’s-coming exhibit in the concourse.

Smitten with the notion that we could own and operate a 16-foot tri-haul Arrowglass pushed by a 35-horsepower Johnson outboard, Barb and I took the plunge and signed the papers the next day at Niles Outboard.

I look back and wonder, what were we thinking? We had been married just a year and lived in an apartment building. Our tow vehicle would be a 1975 Chevy Vega. I was a reporter at The Salem News and Barb was a substitute school teacher. We occasionally borrowed $10 to make it to our next paydays.

But we owned a boat, a cherry red bow-rider with a convertible top. At the time, it may have seemed to be a foolish buy, but it turned out to be one of our best investments. The $2,900 boat-motor-trailer price tag was a small price to pay for upping our game on the lakes and rivers around Youngstown and Warren.

And up our game we did.

Our earliest adventures in the boat we named Pink Panther were at Mosquito Lake. I still recall a lot of the details from the April day when we launched the boat at the state park ramp and putted out to 7,000 acres of water, where we had zero experience. We knew Mosquito was home to walleyes, which was a good enough reason to give it a go.

A friend joined us and off we motored in search of walleyes. Our game plan was based on the flimsy advice offered by a neighbor who certainly qualified as a one-trick angler: troll Hot-n-Tots. He said it worked for him on Lake Erie, so he opined it would work at Mosquito.

Two flaws accompanied the Hot-n-Tot theory. The neighbor, I later learned, rarely actually caught walleyes, and the three of us anglers aboard Pink Panther that day had no clue about Mosquito’s bottom contours and depth. We were looking for the veritable needle in a haystack.

Two hours into our morning, weary of snagging stumps and shivering under the gray sky, we returned to the ramp, loaded the boat on the trailer and returned home. I pledged to myself that I would learn Mosquito.

It wasn’t long before we began to catch Mosquito ‘eyes drifting nightcrawler harnesses off the famous “Red Barn” and cemetery. We boated enough fish for family fish fries, but never really loaded the boat. Some days were successful, some were not, but all of them combined to jumpstart me in understanding Mosquito’s nuances.

Walleyes got me interested in Mosquito. Crappies soon became one of my favorite targets there, and then I joined the local Mohawk Valley Bass Club, which opened my eyes to the healthy population of largemouth bass. It was at Mosquito where I learned the art of flipping Texas-rigged plastic worms to cattails, willow bushes and tangles of drowned tree trunks and branches.

Over the years, Mosquito has been one of my favorite fishing holes. I have enjoyed success often, especially with the largemouths, but Mosquito also has delivered just enough disappointments to keep our love-hate relationship from blossoming into true romance.

And those shoes we bought that day back in 1977? They are long gone. But my flings with Mosquito Lake are still bearing fruit. Like all relationships, I look forward to my next encounter.

Jack Wollitz writes this column every week expressly for readers of the Tribune Chronicle and Vindicator. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.