Rooting through the main pouch, I pulled an eight inch June Bug colored Jelly Worm from a plastic bag and rigged it weedless, Texas-style. Quickly glancing left and right for snakes, I slowly rushed into the clearing in front of the stump. My entrance was announced with a boil of water three feet from the bank. I had just spooked a big sow bass propped up on a sand saucer nursery. Taking a deep breath, I realized I was still rattled from the snake, yet anxious to throw the worm toward the stump.
A plastic worm has probably caught more bass than any other lure, but there is something about seeing the strike of any fish. I went with the Snagless Sally® for the first series of casts. Launching the spinner out past the right side of the stump, I started slow reeling the moment the lure got wet. You could see it approaching the stump, wobbling as it came through the jumble of roots. Released from the roots, it flashed a couple more times until it went over where the sand dropped off. A black streak took it to the right. I set the hook. The bass vaulted like the picture on the cover of Bassmaster Magazine.
“Get ’em, Champ!” I heard Dad call out. Between the stump and me, it cut back left, digging deep at an angle to the bank. The head poked above the surface as it fought back toward me. In a crazed headshake, the fish tossed the Snagless Sally® limply into the pond. The fight was over. The fish’s memory had lasted, obviously.
I caught two more fish off that stump. Both were keepers I put one on the stringer. Dad walked up on me with a nice stringer of bass and blue gill. We exchanged how things went on our individual march. I told him about the snake. He told me I did the right thing by not moving.
“Snakes naturally want to escape from danger. Standing still let him do what he wanted to do,” Dad said. I shook my head up and down when needed, acting like that was my plan from the beginning. I didn’t tell him about sprinkling on the grass afterwards.
“Look, son!” He pointed at a big mamma bass suspended over her nest. “Get your worm pole.”
In an effort not to spook her off again, I slow motioned to my pole like a scene from an old Kung Fu movie. I could hear the background music in my head. Standing back away from the bank, I flipped the worm underhand, over the nest. She flinched at the noise, but didn’t move away. I inched the worm into the nest, and let it lay dead center and watched. She swam backwards, tilted down, and picked up the worm in her mouth. I spastically jerked the pole up to set the hook only to hit Dad in the chest with the worm. Worse yet, I had to duck out of the way so it could hit him. Thud was the sound behind me.
“I’m sorry, are you OK?”
Dad was rubbing his chest when he said, “I’m fine, but you have to let her carry the bait off the nest before setting the hook.” She was still there. I worked the worm to the same spot. She picked up the bait. I waited. She moved off the nest.
“Now, Dad?”
“Go ahead.” I jerked and the worm shot between us like a bullet into some clump grass. Once I reeled it in, we saw the back third of the worm was gone. She wasn’t eating the bait, but merely taking out the trash. We both tried everything we had, short of snagging, to catch her, but she wasn’t interested in what we had to offer. She was on duty. You don’t eat on duty. We left her alone.
We walked back the direction Dad had come from, pitching bait in here and there, just talking and walking. Dad made sure to show me where he had found a fish nest. He showed me a working wasp’s nest. It was a big one dangling from a willow limb over the water. After we walked past it, I picked up a pinecone and threw it into the tree. I didn’t hit the nest, but the disturbance caused a buzz of activity that sent Dad and I double-timing across some soft sand.
“Why’d you do that, Champ?” Dad asked breathlessly.
“I don’t know. It was like my arm took over.” We both laughed. The fish were coated in sand we had kicked up. At the next clearing, we rinsed them in the pond.
At the car, we took the fish off the stringers, putting them in a five-gallon bucket that was in the trunk. We split a big bottle of RC Cola Dad had on ice in a small cooler in the back seat. Dad shook the ice from the drink cooler onto the fish in the bucket. Except for the fishing poles, we put all our gear in the trunk and closed it. The fishing rods went in the car.
“Before we leave, Champ, let’s spend a minute to police this area.” The old soldier from yester-year—twenty years of service—needed to clean up behind some reckless recruits. The new soldiers had had a party and left a clutter of empty beer bottles/cans on and around a picnic table. We picked them up, even the big chunks of broken bottles, and put them in a fifty-five-gallon drum that was near the table. I didn’t like having to pick up behind somebody, but it did look much better once we finished. It only took a few minutes to make things right. Dad was happier, though disappointed in the men who left their mess for others to pick up.
He told me, “A real soldier wouldn’t do this.” It was a hint for my lifetime.
On the way home, we stopped at a Burger Doodle and washed up in the restroom. Dad got us a hamburger, fries, and a Coke to go. I told Dad about the snake a couple more times, telling him not to mention it to Mom each time I brought it up. She’d get nervous over any snake and might throw a momma-block on Dad about fishing with me at the pond. She loved us so much, but she didn’t need to know everything. It would be best to omit some trip details for everyone’s good.
I cleaned the fish when we got home. Dad put away the fishing gear. We had fish that night for dinner. It was good. The best taste, for me, came from knowing we had released the best fish we caught back to the pond and not the kitchen.
There, in their pond, they spawned and live everlasting. As far as I know, her great-grand fish await my Pop-R. Fish are far more than food. Thirty some years have passed, and she, the one guarding her nest, still satisfies me. I remain content with the choice I made as a young man. I’ve made the same type of decisions during the years since. It is still good. I’m just as happy releasing a fish as when I ran across the sand to tell my father I let her go. Pure fishing satisfaction doesn’t always end-up passing across the tongue.
Chapter 4 - My First Trophy Fish
“Come on, we’re going to Aunt Quida’s house!” Mom told me to my total surprise. It was a three-mile ride I didn’t want to make. She didn’t give me time to make an excuse why I couldn’t go. In my opinion, listening to two women talk, about everything I didn’t care anything about, would waste a gorgeous, summer afternoon. They could talk for hours, say goodbyes for half an hour in the doorway, go home, and then talk on the phone for an hour, or more, that evening. Don’t get me wrong; I loved Uncle Russ and Aunt Quida and their daughters Cindy, Ann, Cathy, and Suzy. They had been friends since Dad and Russ were in the Army decades before my time. After Dad got out of the Army, he moved Mom and me to Virginia Beach, Virginia to be near to Uncle Russ, Aunt Quida, and the girls. They were as close as or closer than the family we left in West Virginia. Nonetheless, sitting around listening to two women talk was not something a young boy likes to do. Besides, Uncle Russ was at work and the girls were out, so it was just Mom, Aunt Quida, and I in the house. It didn’t take long for me to become bored out of my mind.
I presently found myself outside, walking down a typical middle class neighborhood street, kicking a rock along with me. About a quarter mile from Aunt Quida’s house, there was a small bridge that crossed over a canal three times the size of a good ditch. Heading for it, I am drawn to water like the proverbial moth to the flame.
One side of the bridge had a pedestrian walkway. A third of the way across, I stopped and popped my head over the railing. I noticed a beer can washed up against the rocks placed to prevent erosion around the bridge. It was making a soft, peaceful pinging sound. The brownish water slowly moved down stream, carrying