My Guiding Today Wasn't Half Bad, But My Fishing Stunk--In More Ways Than One

 

Nearly everywhere in Albright's I took Rob today, he managed to catch fish. Here are his two best ones for the day. We didn't take time to weigh any of our fish today, 'cause we were just trying to develop a game plan for the Dewey Mullins Memorial Bass Tourney scheduled this coming Saturday.

Rob caught a total of 10 bass, with all but one of them a keeper. He also bagged a white perch, a grindle, and, believe it or not, a baitfish that couldn't have been more than an inch long. One barb of the crankbait's treble hook went completely through this baitfish when a pod of them jumped just as Rob's lure hit the water. I've been fishing a lot of years, but I can truthfully say this was the first time I've ever witnessed a baitfish impaled that way on a hook.

All of Rob's fish came on a Yo-Zuri SS Minnow, a spinnerbait, and a Bandit Footloose crankbait. He was putting fish in the boat left and right, when all I could muster were a couple of ol' grindle, a pickerel and a small striper.

I truly was beginning to think that the way my day had started was having this adverse effect on my luck. You see--Rob and I had decided to launch at first light, which means it still was dark as we hustled around the boat inside my shed, getting it rigged and ready to go.

We hadn't been going about these chores more than a few minutes when I started detecting a foul but all-too-familiar smell--"dog crap," to be exact. Unknown to me, Rob also was smelling the same thing. Neither one of us was saying anything about it at this point, though.

When I climbed behind the wheel of my van to move the boat down to the ramp, the odor became overpowering. I was unhooking the strap when I looked down at my feet and saw the tell-tale evidence. It was all over both my shoes. Rob saw me splashing water with my feet and scraping my shoes on the ramp's surface and asked what was wrong. It was then he told me that he, too, had noticed the odor but couldn't figure out where it was coming from after checking his own shoes and finding nothing.

Once I had removed the last remnants from my shoes, we launched the boat and shoved off, none the worse off. As the day wore on, though, and I hadn't boated a single bass, I began thinking that the stink I had started the day with perhaps was transcending down to the bass, who were just thumbing their noses at everything I threw at them.

Finally, however, in the proverbial 11th hour, I finally hooked and landed this fish on a Yo-Zuri SS Minnow to dodge a fifth skunk this season.

I've always said that it doesn't take a big fish to make me happy, and that certainly was the case today. I can't tell you how happy I was to see Rob shove the net under this fish and bring him aboard for me.

There's one more thing I feel compelled to mention in this post, and it's aimed at the four people on two jet skis who were running a short ways ahead of Rob and me as we came back into West Neck Creek this afternoon, getting ready to call it a day. We watched these "idiots"--and I don't use that term loosely--cut every marker in the creek on the wrong side. Maybe they feel invincible, but stupid tricks like this, especially in a hazard-strewn creek like West Neck, could buy you the farm. Be smart--boat safe. Otherwise, the next funeral you attend may be your own.