Hook, Line & Sinker...

The weather forecast I heard Julie Wilcox give at the breakfast table this morning said sunshine this morning, with clouds moving in and thickening this afternoon, and rain overnight. I should have known better than to believe her. I didn't even get out of the channel to the main creek before dark clouds were rolling in fast overhead, which convinced me just to stay in West Neck.

Because I had finished the day last Sunday with a bang-o-lure, I started with that this morning, and in no time, had two bass in the boat. The first one weighed 2-0 and went on to become my best fish of the day. Unfortunately, the lure's rear hook had caught a gill plate, and the bass already was bleeding like a stuck pig when I swung him over the side. I quickly unhooked him, snapped the accompanying picture, weighed him, and tried to release him over the side of the boat, but he wanted to roll belly-up on me. I worked with him several minutes with no luck, so decided to put him in the livewell and run the aerator for a while. I kept checking on him for the next 30 minutes, and by that time, he was fully upright and splashing at will, so I released him to be caught another day.

A matter of only a few minutes passed before a dink jumped on the bang-o-lure, and by the time I turned him loose, raindrops already were falling on my head. For most of the next hour, they kept falling intermittently--enough so that I had to break out the rain gear. During the showers, I hooked but lost three fish on a spinnerbait, and when the showers died off, so did the bite. I didn't even see anything moving in the water.

In frustration, I decided to get off the main creek and ease into one of the coves. That, too, seemed dead for a good spell. When the sun came out bright, though, I grabbed a silver with blue back Bandit Footloose that my friend John Goodman recently gave me and literally wore most of the paint off it in the remaining hours of the day. The only way I could get bites was to toss the Bandit right up against the shoreline, into the thickest stuff I could find, then just twitch the bait--usually only once--before a fish would unload on it. I missed a lot of the strikes, but managed to boat seven fish for the day. Besides the 2-0, I got a 1-3, and the rest were dinks.

It wasn't until later, after I had gotten home and was talking to my friend Wayne Hayes, that I learned he and Gary Coderre had found their fish the same way during the Classic.

It wasn't a day I'll brag about, but at least I didn't sit home bored out of my mind.