“Bawn-bawn,
Beenaba
Bawn-bawn,
Beenaba,
Bawn, bawn, bawwwn.”

Yup, it has been two weeks and “Sweet Home Alabama” is still stuck in my head from my visit to the Classic in Birmingham. Except when Casey Ashley was singing the National Anthem (holy crap, can he sing!), they played it everywhere. Anytime. Didn’t even really need an excuse. Guess I can’t blame them… I’m from a state with just a show tune. I’d probably play it all the time too.

The drive all night to make the media day interviews took its toll. I slept in a little and missed the Day 1 take-off. It is almost an hour from the hotel to Lay Lake. Knew I was finally there when it looked like I was driving through Yellowstone National Park. Had someone seen an elk? A bear? Nope. There’s Kevin VanDam fishing a cove just behind the Beeswax Bait Store.

I pulled in, camera ready.

“You can’t park there.”
“How about here?”
“Are you buying?”
“I’m looking…”
“Good enough.”

Bought a couple of items my tackle bag was lacking and inquired about an out-of-state license. I’ve never caught a spotted bass- I hear they are almost a strong as smallies. And I wanted to get a feel of the lake. The best way I knew how to experience what the anglers were going through was to cast in the same chilly, murky water.

7-days is Alabama’s shortest non-resident license… $26. Ouch. Hmmm. Not exactly sure when/if I’m even going to get in some fishing time. The lady in the coffee trailer next to the bait store pointed out a regular strolling across the parking lot who just caught a 10-pounder the day
before.

“That’s his photo on the wall of the bait shop,” she added.

You had me at “10-pounder.”

I introduced myself to Mr. Sam Ray. While he scoped VanDam with his binoculars, we visited about the 47-degree water temperature, the recent shad kill, coon tail, a ditch, and how the lake was just a few days from being “On.” Then I asked about the best place to fish from shore… just wanted a chance to catch anything. No shore locations came to mind… but he offered to take me fishing on his boat on Saturday, Day 2.

“But not too early. Wait until it warms up a bit.”

Outstanding. I said if I made it to the lake mid morning, I would give him a call.

At the parking lot of the boat ramp, I showed my media card necklace to the security fellow and was told where to park. Took a seat on a bench to wait for my media boat ride, make some notes, and “Tweet.” (Some of my non-bass tournament following friends/relatives now think I was stalking the recreational activities of a martial arts movie star.) I found myself sitting next to Steven Wells, Pam Martin-Wells’ husband. Another good, productive chat with a nice fellow.

Once on the media boat, I was rather surprised to see how fast VanDam was working his lipless crankbait. He really made it scoot. In only 4 feet of water, he got hung up a few times… But he also caught fish. On the flutter of a drop, I learned later. In fact, he caught enough fish that a great blue heron landed on a nearby dock to take some notes.

The gentleman who captained this media boat was Bobby McDonald, Youth Director for the Alabama B.A.S.S. Federation Nation. He knows the lake too. In fact, he put out some of the brush piles VanDam was fishing. But sitting a few yards away watching him cast, I suddenly did not want to fish. I know they don’t own the lake…. But I did not want to interfere. I was interviewing some of these anglers the day before. What if I caught a 10-pounder just up the bank? Heck, a few ounces can make or break a career in these tournament things.

I shared with Bobby that I had driven 12 hours, and brought my poles thinking I might cast in the same historic tournament water… but was having second, no, third thoughts.

“Hey,” he agreed. “They don’t come to your work.”

I nodded, but silently wished they would.

The closest I would come to a bass that weekend would be at the Classic Expo near the Berkley tank. How about a rain check, Mr. Roy?

Well, it is just about time for a big road trip to what has been called the Super Bowl of bass fishing tournaments, the BassMaster Classic.  I’ll be in an old truck.  It worked for Scott Brown.

Okay, my truck does not have 200,000 miles on it but it does have that trademarked early Silverado look of the missing lower front bumper skirt and one daytime running light always out.  I hear Alabama had some recent snows.  My truck is not 4-wheel drive so I’m going to haul some 4-cavity cinderblocks across state lines.

MapQuest says I’m looking at an 11-hour drive from OK to Birmingham.  Yes, I could have flown and picked up a rental at the airport.  But unless I’m on Alaska Air, a significant part of fishing is the road trip.  So not only am I loaded with tunes, but I have a package of several comedy CDs that I have never heard.  This Christmas gift from 2008 has a label warning about strong language, so it has not made it past the Chipmunks on the play-list in the minivan.

Fresh off a nerve-rattling 20 seconds with Coach Bobby Knight, I am still not sure what I’m getting myself into. Media from all over the country will attend and there will be 3 days of coverage on ESPN.  Last year over 100,000 people attended the Classic Expo.  However, since visiting my first bass tournament on Lake Dardanelle in early 2009, I have now met (or e-mailed) some famous pro anglers, editors, and media members. They have been a very approachable, helpful, and friendly group. And they have been very kind to put up with some of my unusual questions.  (You should have seen Skeet’s face when I asked him if he had a crazy aunt who sends him chocolate bobbers.)

A morning media boat ride is scheduled for Day 1 but I have been reading that Lay Lake is cold so I’m packing long johns and Carhartt overalls.  Also hoping to throw in a line from the shore one day so I’m bringing a couple of spinning outfits and a small tackle bag of spinner baits, jigs, and assorted plastics.

Whatever happens at the Classic I will return with stories, a media card full of digital pictures, and some gifts for my wife and kids who have been greatly supportive of my fishing and writing habits. It has also been helpful to have an understanding employer that lets me have a couple of days off when needed.  Thank you!

“We don’t need no stinking waders.”

I admire my friend John’s bravado. And perhaps we could have gotten away with it last September when we first started to plan this fishing trip near downtown Tulsa. But high water conditions led to rescheduling until late January was upon us and we knew that a wade across the Arkansas River in shorts just would have attracted the attention of the local news station thinking they were covering a bizarre fund-raiser.

In a pinch, one might be tempted to purchase a product called something like: “economy vinyl stocking foot waders.”  After all, $7 sounds a lot better than a $120 may-be-years-before-I-wear-again commitment.  But think vinyl long-johns. Without the insulation.  And not, “I’m drinking cocoa by a roaring fire at a ski lodge in an L.L. Bean catalogue” long-johns.   More like the bottom-half of a swamp creature novelty costume.  Something you (or John in this case) would wear once, blowout the crotch (I’ll spare you that photo), then chuck.  Not to be outdone with a fashion statement, I sported my duct-tape-patched, mouse-chewed hole mid-thigh on my neoprene chest-waders.  We were a motley crew crossing Riverside Drive that afternoon.  And proved once again that you can wear anything in public as long as you are holding a fishing rod.

Despite the algae-covered rocks which threatened close encounters with broken bottles and protruding rusty cable wires and the flashing lights next to the big sign warning that the water is rising when the lights are flashing (“they’re always flashing,” they consoled me), the wide area below the small dam has lots of potential.  It has a bit of everything:  swift main channels, walls, edges, eddies, riffles, boulders…   Plenty of places to hold fish. Duncan, our guide for the afternoon had never been skunked here.  On light spinning tackle he catches white bass (“speed perch,” he likes to call them) or stripers… even snagged a paddlefish once.

Standard lures are spinners or jigs.  By shrewdly snagging rocks every few casts, we were able to work through a wide variety of colors and trailers.  Losing lures is just part of fishing thoroughly and we did our best to appease the Snag-Gods.  Even tied jigs in tandem so I could lose two at a time.  But I never threw any lure that I didn’t mind losing.  Perhaps that is what made them angry that day.

Urban fishing has its own unique brand of discovery…  Even if that discovery is wads of line, dozens of sinkers, lures, a fishing pole, and some golf balls.  It’s not exactly the romanticism of combing a warm, sandy beach but when fishing becomes an exercise in futility, there is some appeal to the opportunity to break even, more or less, with all the tackle thrown to the rocks.

By the hike back to the car, we had gained about 2 pounds.  In the tackle bag.  Just in lead. Duncan topped us by plucking a $5 bill from the exposed river bottom rocks on the way back. I got skunked on yet another fishing trip, but the beer money was a nod from the river that we should return someday.

“What, is he stupid?  Didn’t he read the reports?”

My wife’s cousin, Jeremy, was not very sympathetic when he learned I was steelhead fishing in Elk Creek, a tributary of Lake Erie near Girard, Pennsylvania.

I knew the risks.  The reports coming back from www.fisherie.com were not good.  24-hours earlier, the creek had been declared a “blowout.”  Ideally, I’d have to wait several days for conditions to improve.

But I didn’t have several days.

With perhaps my only trip to PA during this season’s steelhead run, the remaining logistics of the additional 2-hour trip would really have to fall into place.  Add to this a one night visit from friends Tim and Julie who drove the 5 hours from Eastern PA, our fishing window of opportunity had become more like a “slight gap”… A “fissure,” perhaps.  Whatever, we had to give it a try.

I don’t “know” steelhead.  We’re just acquaintances.  So not really qualified to guide.  But I’ve been taught a few tricks, and know where to go.  The water gauge information showed that the flow was dropping quickly; conditions in the creek were improving each hour.  There were a couple of holes in the creek that might work and the “blowout” reports should keep some of the anglers home.  But the wind was from the south so the lake would be flat.  And I’m a sucker for a south wind up here.

So at about 5:45 a.m., a couple of days after Christmas, I was standing in the mouth of Lake Erie and had the entire to lake to myself. I’m always amazed at how much the mouth of Elk Creek shifts and changes.  Where I stood last year, I wouldn’t even be able to hit the water with a cast. There is now a long shallow gravel bar on the East side of the mouth of Elk Creek.  It took slogging 150 feet out in my neoprene waders just to get mid thigh.

I’m addicted to casting glowing Lil’ Cleos and had a new toy.  For Christmas presents I had given away a couple of the new “Rapala Charge N Glows”.  Bought one for myself too, you know, for research purposes.  About the size of a case for sunglasses, you drop the lure inside, close the lid and push a button for a few seconds to get a solid charge all over.  While standing in a dark, very cold lake, every 10 casts or so I would fire up the world’s smallest tanning bed.  No bikini line.  No farmers tan.

The ad stated that lures would hold a charge longer.  I’m not so sure that a blast from a strong flashlight cupped in my hand wouldn’t have lasted about the same.  But I look forward to trying this on lures that glow on all sides.

With a visibility of only about 8”, I fanned the casts with my 11-foot noodle rod, thinking I might find fish on the edges of the turbidity which contained occasional leaves and ice chunks, but at least no shrubbery.  I tested different speeds, action, and depth.  And when I’d lose a Cleo to a rock, try a different color.  But no hits.

When the sun came up, I moved to the stream to join Tim, who was struggling as well.  Where there were 50 anglers last year, I counted 7, trying a variety of methods. Egg patterns, hair jigs under bobbers, minnows, and spoons.  Instead of fish rolling enough to keep you warm for another few casts, we saw a fish about every 30 minutes. In 4 hours of fishing we only saw one small fish landed.  “Tight lines” for the wrong reasons.

We left the mouth and checked a couple of upper holes, but the water was still the same stained murky gray and by then that deep not-catching-fish cold, had entered my bones. It was tough to give up but my perceived fissure had re-fused.  We were not refused at Wendy’s.

I prefer to have a little elbowroom when I am fishing. That shoulder-to-shoulder stuff gets old in a hurry. But sometimes, especially when traveling to unfamiliar waters, you have to take what you can get. There was a brief window of fishing opportunity recently in Kansas. A meager couple of diversionary hours to fish with my cousin, Aaron. I braced myself for a throng of anglers as we planned to hit a popular fishing area known as Rocky Ford, near Manhattan, KS.

$5.50 for a 24-hour out-of-state license and another $3.48 for a little blue plastic tub of night crawlers and we were ready to try our luck below this small dam, about ½ mile below the giant dam of Tuttle Creek Reservoir. One brochure lists the primary species as channel catfish, flathead catfish, white bass, and walleye. A month earlier, I saw a father and son with a stringer that included one hybrid white bass, one small flathead, one small drum, and a 4-pound bigmouth buffalo. But judging from the piles of dead gar that greeted us, I think another species deserves to make the list.

With the discovery of very few cars in the parking area, I was jazzed. I mean, it was a weekday, and everyone was just working, right? I saw the sign, but didn’t want to read it. Work day or not, if the fish are biting, anglers will be there.

With a distinct lack of hits after fishing the first half hour, doubt began to gnaw. We needed something to change our luck. The only other anglers, a young couple, soon began to pack up.

“You want some minnows?” the guy asked.

I hesitated. On one hand, free minnows could be just the break we needed. On the other, it has been my experience that if minnows are being given away, it is time to try a different spot. Or skip rocks. It was both a generous donation and an unspoken taunt, saying “I’ll bet you can’t catch anything either.”

There have been days when I have bought minnows and not caught a fish. Didn’t really bother me. I knew what I was getting into and could temper my optimism accordingly. But the surprise of gift minnows… can be a disorienting ride of chance. When you buy tickets to see people perform, generally you know what you are going to get. When people just show up on your doorstep, it could be Jehovah’s Witnesses… Or it could be the Schwan man.

Foolishly, I accepted the challenge.

Then I realized I didn’t have a bucket. Fortunately, cousins Kelsey and Lucas also arrived on the scene and so we poured the minnows over the ice in Kelsey’s empty soda cup. 32 oz. of disoriented golden shiners. Mmmm.

It was a beautiful day and I hadn’t fished with Aaron in years. We hoped we could do something others could not. And fishing is all about hope. So, under power lines decorated with dangling lures, weights, and line, we threw all that we had at them.

Lures, bait, it didn’t matter. Nothing was hungry that day. We had some little taps, but never anything steady enough to set the hook. In the trapped backwater pool, we saw many small sunfish and several gar rise but no surface activity in the main channel. When our time was up, we had been “skunked”, and not just from the rotting gar carcasses.

Hiking back to the car, Aaron showed me where he caught a big flathead a couple of years ago. The water only has to come up, oh,… about 30 feet.

Recently, I returned from a little vacation at Hilton Head, South Carolina. Shared a time-share condo with the in-laws. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, it had been 3 years since this unsalted dog had dropped a line in saltwater. I remembered the guy at the marina telling me that I’d only catch sharks and rays in the surf. All I caught were tiny redfish, but occasionally I’d feel a hit and then the line was cut. So for months ahead of time, I had visions of hooking something big, shlogging back up the beach, and handing the rod to my 7-year-old boy, who has expressed desire to catch a shark.

Several times prior to the trip, I asked if my in-laws, who were driving down from PA, could throw in the fishing poles that I store up there. Mainly needed my 2-piece 11 ft. steelhead “noodle” rod. Not only does that rod make everything fun, I really wanted the length so I could point the rod to the sky, clear the waves, and feel the slightest tap. But “beggars can’t be choosers”, so if they just had room for the medium spinning outfit, that’d be fine too. My family was flying and, with car seats and such, I didn’t want to mess with a rod as luggage if I didn’t have to.

What arrived in the back of their Buick Rainer was my kids’ two K-mart specials. Matching little red spinning and push-button outfits for the kids to tease the bluegill and creek chubs in PA. So off to the Hilton Head Wal-Mart.

Many choices. Especially numerous, was an unrecognized brand of spinning reel, complete with a loaded tackle box. Although seemingly a good value, the rod was overkill for the tiny redfish I recalled and if something was going to beat me with a lighter rod, so much the better. It was my birthday, and I’ve never owned a Penn. There was a spiffy little number there that I carried around with me for a while but it was a one-piece 7-foot rod. I’d have to get a two-piece to fit in our rental car. I settled on a Shakespeare Cirrus, pre-spooled with unknown line.

The Hilton Head Wal-Mart (which may or may not have anyone working at the time who knows how to handle fishing licenses) also had a couple of nicely stocked bait freezers and refrigerators. I grabbed a couple of packages of shrimp with the head on, stopping to do a double take when I walked by professionally packaged chicken necks. For crabbing.

Once at the beach the kids were having a good time with my wife and the grandparents, so off I headed chest deep in the surf with swimming suit pockets loaded with shrimp. Nothing like crotch chumming for sharks to keep you on your toes.

In my three afternoons of fishing like this, I caught a dozen tiny redfish, letting the boy reel in a couple, and landed one blacktip reef shark that was about the size of the rubber shark my son bought at the South Carolina Aquarium gift shop. On a couple of occasions there was some surface activity so I raced back, retied, and tried throwing some lures but couldn’t find the action. Always felt as if I was too late and the fish had headed on down the beach.

The other place I got to fish was on the resort’s private dock on some intracoastal water.

One of my dreams in fishing is to be completely spooled by a fish. Feel that power, that helplessness, when every last bit of line is ripped off and there is nothing I can do about it. When I expressed this to my mother-in-law during an energetic fishing rant one day a few years ago, she said, “Why don’t you just put on less line?” Cute, isn’t she?

The first morning at the dock, the tide was really hauling out. I was surprised at how shallow the murky water was. I threw a couple of times but when nothing happened after a while, the shrimp was always gone. It felt like the shrimp was just being beaten off the hook as it bounced across the bottom. At 9:10 a.m., on my third cast, I hooked up.

Something big just kept steaming out. It wasn’t a fast run. Almost as if the fish didn’t know it was even hooked. I just held on, pleased that maybe I wasn’t the only clueless party involved. I fumbled around with the cell phone and somehow managed to call the family down to see.

The kids came. The kids left. With line still heading out.

After a while, I noticed that my spool was dangerously low. Something had to give. So I palmed the whining reel and tried to force the issue. There was so much weight and power there that I knew the fish could end this whenever it wanted to. Somehow, despite being tremendously outmatched, we seemed to reach an uneasy agreement. It would not go out any further… but it would not necessarily come in either.

Dolphins swam by. Boats went back and forth. Pelicans flew into my line. But the knot held, the rod didn’t break, and the line just kept singing in the wind.

The rod did not have enough backbone for to do anything but hold the load. By slowly taking a handful of steps back and then racing forward winding like crazy, I had managed to gain line. By 10:10, I had back about half of the spool.

The slow, wide arcs and the occasional flip-flip-flip at the surface on the horizon had me thinking this was a large ray. At 10:40, a boat crossed too close. At the exact moment that the boat crossed my fish, the line went slack. NO! Madly reeled in but all my tackle was still there. The hook had just pulled loose.

My arms hurt. My hands were trembling. I had just taken a beating from a fish for over an hour and a half… I could get used to this.