There Are Dill Pickles, And Then There Are Ditch Pickles...

But the latter don't belong in a jar.

Quite a few decades ago, a popular fishing magazine ran a whimsical story about an ol' codger who was famous in his small town for his bass-fishing "secret." Everyone fished the same lake, but this fella could haul in the crafty old lunkers that wouldn't take anyone else's bait, and many futile attempts had been made to borrow, buy or even steal his mysterious secret lure. Someone even had managed to get into his tacklebox but found nothing, except the usual assortment of stuff, along with the ol' fella's lunch.

One day, the storyteller, determined to solve the mystery, sneaked out to the lake before dawn with a pair of high-powered binoculars and hid on the shore. Eventually, the old fisherman showed up and rowed to a nearby spot. After carefully scouring the surroundings for spying eyes, the old fella pulled out his lunch and unwrapped a dill-pickle spear. With his pocketknife, he then carefully shaved it into the rough semblance of a minnow and put it on a hook.

Casting the pickle lure into a weed bed, the old fella proceeded to make it dance and writhe so realistically that a monster bass soon struck with a furious splash. But the hook didn't set, and the watcher could hear the angler's "ptui" of disgust, as the fish spit out the pickle. The old guy patiently cast again and again, each time working the lure so expertly that the big ol' bass simply couldn't resist and eventually was securely hooked and landed.

After the old fella had rowed away with his trophy catch, the narrator extracted himself from his hiding place and thoughtfully made his way home. He never revealed to anyone else what he had learned that day: The whole secret to the ol' man's success was there was no secret at all. He simply was an extraordinarily masterful fisherman...one who even could catch a bass on a dill pickle.

Incidentally, during my Internet research for this item, I came across a new-to-me slang term for the prize fish we all so often get up for at 0-dark-30, then chase around rivers and lakes for the next eight hours. According to the Urban Dictionary, "ditch pickle" describes the "largemouth bass, a green fish that often lives in small murky ponds or in ditch waters."

Also learned it appears the term "ditch pickle" first was used by snowmobilers back in the mid- to late-1990s, when Arctic Cat changed the color of their ZRs from all black to green. Since snowmobilers frequently run the ditches alongside roads, because of the excess snow accumulation, that particular model got the nickname "ditch pickle."

When the term was transferred to bass is hard to say for certain, but in 2010, a fly-fishing-only tournament for bass was created in Vermont, named the "Ditch Pickle Classic."