Bassin’ with George….or John Brown?

My fishing buddy George and I hit Lake D’Arbonne in search of summertime largemouth bass a couple of days ago. Anybody can catch fish on topwaters at daylight or on a worm right before dark, so we weren’t challenged by that.

So we went at 2 p.m. in the middle of August in an East wind (you know…wind from the East, fish bite the least...). Well, we were supposed to go at 2 p.m.

Actually, we didn’t go until 2:30ish. I did mention I was fishing with George, right? I went down and got the boat all ready about 1:30, including about six bottles of water in a little ice chest to help us battle the 95 degree temps. I lowered the boat on the lift and cranked up the Mercury to make sure it was ready to go fishing, too. It had been about six weeks since it’s run.  It was ready. Then I decided it was pretty comfortable right where I was in that padded boat seat and knowing George, I probably had time to take a power nap.

I did have time. And I did take a nap.

“Hey, what are you doing asleep?”, George asked about 30 minutes later as woke me up, tapping the top of my fishing cap with the end of his fishing rod. Lucky he wasn’t a burglar or a racoon.

“Well, I was getting some rest in case you were so late that we had to go night fishing,” I replied.

It was going to be a good day. Anytime we rag each other, we will catch fish. The harder we are on each other, the more fish we catch. We took a boat ride all the way down the lake and fished some new water, picking up several nice bass and having a good time. George was leading for a while, but I caught up.

“Well, I’ll be John Brown“, he said as I lifted the tying bass into the boat.  I thought maybe that was one of his new aliases.

Somewhere out in D’Arbonne there’s a good bass swimming around with my shaky head lure. If you catch him, please bring my lure back.

We tried some shallow boat docks without any luck. No bass hiding in the shade. The water temp was hot, too, nearly 90 — and that’s probably a bit hot for Mr. Largemouth. We tried a couple of deep holes with no luck either. I even stopped the boat in one spot where a huge school of shad showed on the depth finder and appeared to be followed by a bunch of smaller dots that I surmised where crappie. They may have been crappie, but they were apparently not hungry crappie. George isn’t much of a crappie fisherman, so he used that time to catch up on his phone messages. We moved on.

At our final spot, I put on a big eight inch Shaky Head worm and worked it down the side of a little underwater ridge that started at 15 feet deep and fell into 25. There were some old stumps along the edge. I mean, on the depth finder (that’s what us old guys still call our sonar electronics) it looked like one of those places they would fish at on TV. Then “bam”, something grabbed my worm and started swimming off. I set the hook and got the fish turned toward the boat when I made a rookie mistake — I let it get the line in the trolling motor. Goodbye, Mr. Bass.  Or as George said semi-below his breath, “probably Mr. Catfish….”

Sometimes you just can’t win. But I think that if two fishermen are tied with fish actually put in the boat and then one loses a fish, that means that the fisherman that actually had on another bass  is .01 ahead of the guy he is “tied” with.

Don’t you?