A Gentlemanly Sort of Outdoorsman

 

Gloria Jean many long years ago

       Back about the end of October I spent a day and fishing with a lady.  I recommend that very thing for all you grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen, if you can find any ladies which will indeed go fishing with you.  Its kind of a nice change from your regular buddies.

Since the weather had been unseasonably warm for I suspected that the fishing would uncommonly good and I was right.  I took this lady I have known for some time on a fishing trip, up the river to some shoals I know about where the smallmouth and largemouth are congregating, gorging themselves in preparation for harder times which goes along with colder weather.  

       Knowing her as I do, I have never known this particular lady to use casting gear, which most bass fishermen in quest of lunkers are wont to do, because of her aversion to backlashes.  Instead, she likes to use a spin-casting outfit so I fixed her up a medium-light spinning rig with 6-pound line. I tied on a spinner bait worth about 3 dollars, and asked myself if I wanted this younger and far less experienced lady I was with to lose something worth that much to a rock on the bottom or a submerged log in swift water.  It seemed wise to tie on a more economical suspending Rogue, since I have several, and can acquire more at a local thrifty junk shop for fifty cents each.

       The suspending Rogue is a lure that doesn’t float, though it is made much like the floating Rapalas and Rebels shaped something like a long minnow.  It sinks down very slowly and stays up off the bottom, therefore making it more difficult to hang up.  I told her to fish it with jerks and twitches and try not to bother me with questions while I was landing any fish.  And shortly afterward I heard something splashing around behind me and I’ll be darned if she didn’t have a nice smallmouth on that doggone Rogue.  Who’d a thunk it?

       Sometimes you take someone who you figure isn’t going to distract you much from your fishing, and they start catching fish right and left, and that is pretty much what happened for awhile.  I figured eventually I would start hauling them in on my spinner bait, and about that time my lovely feminine guest sees the remains of an old rock building up on the hillside above us.  Suddenly she wants to see it a whole lot worse than she wants to catch fish.

       Women are like that.  They are always getting something romantic in their head about how some old barn or broken down cabin akin to a little home in the woods where someone once grew magnolias and roses and had a husband who looked like Clark Gable.  They get that from sitting around reading romance novels.

       Well, I guess it was the romantic side of me that caused me to agree to tie the boat to a sycamore root and help her up that steep bank trying to keep her from falling in the river, just so she could see that old shack and carry on about finding some pretty rock.  The whole thing amounted to me getting mud in my boat and skinning my elbow and losing a good thirty minutes of prime fishing time.  I displayed a gentlemanly nature and refused to complain.

       An hour later, after watching her little spinning rod bent double on another 16 or 17-inch bass, I took her lure and tied it on my line, and found another one in the tackle box for her to use.  

       That particular lady has always been awfully lucky.  On her honeymoon, she caught her limit of rainbow trout and mine too, before I landed one fish. Lucky for her I was there to bait her hook. But even luck can’t explain how that evening last month I expertly cast my lure around a log three or four times and caught nothing and she cast hers at it and didn’t even get close and a big largemouth inhaled it.  He fought all around the boat, jumping out of the water twice, still keeping the hooks in his mouth.  It was twenty inches long… I think maybe the biggest largemouth she ever caught. How she ever landed that thing I will never know.

       There are some good things about taking a younger woman fishing. But if she is anything like Gloria Jean, don’t let her back the trailer in the water.  Just have her go off somewhere and look for flowers while you get that done.

       I just wanted to let all you ladies who referred to me as a chauvinist just because I once said that female bass were easy to tell from the males because they are fatter when they get older and easier to fool, that my daughters think I am a fine example of what men ought to be.  Gloria Jean probably would prefer me to be a little more like Clark Gable, which I ain’t.  I guess I am a little more like John Wayne.

 

My website is www.larrydablemont.com