A New Year's Fishing Trip He'll Remember for a Long Time

Back in the day, when he had to run a business five days a week, veteran bass angler Charlie Hartley often took advantage of the break between Christmas and New Year's to go someplace warm(er) and fish. It was one of those things he looked forward to all year. There's one such trip that he'll likely never forget.

Charlie had decided to go to Lake Murray and do a little prefishing for an upcoming Megabucks tournament. After four or five days in a campground, it turned really cold. As he explained, a motel was out of Charlie's reach back then.

"It was the kind of cold that penetrates to the bone," he said. "The wind was blowing, the sky was overcast, and no one with a lick of sense was out on the water. It was so bad I actually thought about going home, but thinking was about as far as it went, though."

He already was at the lake, and he knew if he expected to do anything in the upcoming Megabucks, he had to spend as much time as possible learning the lake.

"I looked my map over to see if I could find somewhere to fish out of the wind," said Charlie. "There was this place the locals called The Bass Motel back in a bay. How could a guy pass up a name like that?"

After launching, he ran there and decided to go small and light on his tackle. He tied a No. 5 Shad Rap onto a spinning rod and went to work. It didn't take long before he found a short weed line out of the wind and started casting parallel to it. Almost immediately, he caught a 3-and-a-half-pound largemouth. With spirits high, he continued fishing The Bass Motel.

It wasn't too awful long before Charlie thought he had snagged a stump.

"My lure stopped, and even when I pulled back on the rod with both hands, nothing happened," explained Charlie. "Frustrated, I started to move my boat forward to see if I could get my Shad Rap back. That's when I realized it was moving sideways.

"Now, I'm not the smartest guy on the planet," he continued, "but I do know that stumps don't move...only fish. In truth, however, I thought it was probably a striper. They'd just been introduced into Murray, and I didn't figure I had hooked a bass big enough I couldn't move it. However, I was wrong.

"When she came alongside the boat, she was so big she looked like a monster...a largemouth that had some sort of genetic mutation. Her head was massive, and she was about as deep as she was long. I could see that her gills were flared, her mouth was wide open, and my tiny crankbait was way back in her mouth.

"Somehow, my line held, and I managed to get her into the boat. She weighed 9 pounds 15 ounces on my handheld scales. That's a New Year's Day I'll never forget. It's a good fishing lesson, too. Fish every chance you get, no matter the conditions. You never know."