David's Lure

 

You hear about tube jigs. I am a tube fisherman. I love fishing for bass out of a float tube, particularly at this time of the year when the first thrill of the day is the feel of cool water rushing up and around areas of my body I only visit in the bathtub. 

Doing that at this time of the year will suck the air right out of you, and totally clear your brain of all other thoughts. I guarantee it. Once done, I start fishing, mind properly redirected. 

There’s a rocky bluff right in front of my house running north and south for maybe two hundred yards that helps corral the creek water of Baker’s Branch on its run under Highway 51 to the main part of Lake Keystone that floats Pier 51 Marina. Only two hundred yards of sandstone rock rubble. There are bass living in that rubble. Not many, but at my age it’s all I need. How much rice can a China man eat? 

Technically, from my front yard I can hit the lake with a rock. Well, I used to be able to do it better than now. It’s maybe forty-five yards from my house to the water along that bluff. 

My raggedy old arm has lost maybe fifty years of usefulness to youth league batting practice, and one shoulder surgery. Of my three grandsons, two can hit the lake with a rock anytime they want to, and on occasion I order it done just to admire the flight of a nicely thrown rock and remind myself of what I used to be able to do. Thoughts of mortality come to us in different ways, right? 

Bass and baitfish feel the rocks hit the water, no doubt, and scatter like shot silver when the rocks land close. I’ve seen it happen. 

I said the rock bluff runs north and south, right? Maneuvering a float tube is its only disadvantage. Being round and bulky, they do not want to go the direction you want them to, convenient though they are in all other respects. In a tube, it takes forever to get from point A to B. I have learned not to worry about time spent; to use the wind, to fish with it, not against it; either a north wind or a south one, to gently propel me along with just a few dog-paddle-kicks from my feet, which dangle like shark bait right under the tube. 

You hardly ever are not thinking of the vulnerability of your legs, feet, and “other things” to the things under water, all water, which want to mess with you; giant snapping turtles, man eating catfish, and snakes, being chief among them. It’s part of the adventure and should be considered as such. Your imagination at work while float tubing for bass is altogether as much of the thrill of this type of fishing as that first rush of water, I described a while ago. 

Last night I put my tube in the water at the north end of the bluff, and let a gentle north wind start me down the two hundred yards. A cool, north wind in the last week of July in this country is not to be wasted in any case, fishing or not. You must get outside in it, for you know what is coming up next week: the hottest weather of the year, no fooling. It’s part of the reason I got the old tube out of the shed where it haunts my memory. 

I used a seven-foot long fast-action rod with an old seven-foot rod light-weight open-faced spinning reel and twelve-pound Berkley green Trilene line, a rig I have been fishing both salt and fresh for about fifteen years now. I tied on a godawful-looking crankbait David Campbell gave me about six or seven years ago, I can’t remember which. I do not like exchanging good old things that still work for newer. Pam and I will have been married fifty years next July. It is not a record in my family. 

David’s crankbait is one of the oddest looking I have ever held in my hand. It resembles the old Helin flatfish, a lure popular back in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s. It looks like it wanted to be a crawdad, maybe, but there are no silver crawdads. Sometimes, held in a certain light, it looks like it wanted to be a shad just before it changed its mind to become a crawdad. 

Sometimes looking at it with a glass of tea in my hand on the front porch in the evening, I think it might have been left on earth by alien fishermen as the ultimate proof of life in other parts of the galaxy. I had promised David years ago to try the lure, but never had until last night. 

I caught a fish on that bait last night with my third cast. Then I caught another on about my tenth cast, I think. Both bass. Two to three pounders I’d guess, that pulled a little drag on the old reel. I snapped them onto a chain stringer for pictures later with my old Canon PowerShot. I have about worn out that old digital point and shoot, but it still works, and tucks handily in a Ziploc dropped in a breast pocket of my coveralls. I am a simple man. 

The bass were up in the rubble working the rocks for this year’s fingerling shad and silver crawdads. Baitfish were skittering the surface everywhere shallow. Something, many “somethings”, were after them. 

The awkward maneuverability of a float tube makes you fish an area slowly whether you want to or not, and over the years I have found this to be a far, far greater way to fish than any I have tried before. Most of us fish water too fast; me included. 

I did not catch another bass for another thirty minutes; about the time I saw the first bats flitting about for this year’s bumper crop of mosquitoes. Then I caught two, in about that section of the bluff that lies right in front of my house, always a good spot because, I think, of the size of the boulders that shelter the water there. Bass like the shade, everywhere you find them. 

I looked up over my head towards the top of the bluff, fully expecting to see a baseball-sized rock come flying over the top of it at any moment, but it did not happen. 

One of those last two bass would’ve topped three pounds, I think. All of them were alive and kicking when I laid them in the grass at shoreline and took a picture of them. All of them powered their way back to deeper water with strong tail kicks when I released them into the water. 

If I had waited another fifteen minutes to leave, I would have needed a flashlight to avoid the copperheads between me and the house. I remember disconnecting David’s weird lure, so as not to lose it, and stashing it carefully in a small tackle box kept in the float tube for that purpose. Without doubt, for no apparent reason, the weird lure was being held in higher regard than formerly. 

I listened to whippoorwills calling in the trees around me on the walk up to the house, coveralls wet, and wet tube slung over the shoulder that Dr. Boone repaired. I remember that.

 © 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen