A Lunker Bass and a Small Rock

 

Uncle Norten with a spinner bait lunker

It was March about 15 years ago, and the bass I was fighting was a dandy.   I lifted a spinner-bait up over the top of some underwater logs and he nailed it.  After a long winter, a fellow needs something like that, a hard fight that ruffles the surface considerably, a casting rod with a little backbone in it arced hard, a bass that feels bigger than he is when you get him in the boat.  I said, as I held him high for my uncle to look at, that he’d go seven pounds.

My uncle knew bass fishing, and bass, like no fisherman I ever fished with.  I never fish anywhere without thinking about him, wishing he was still here.  “Six and a half!“ he said around the butt of his cigar. on that warm sunny morning years ago. 

That afternoon we stopped at a little grocery store and asked if we could weigh that bigger one on meat scales in the back part of the store.  The owner agreed, as long as I brought the fish around to the back door.  As he and my uncle waited, I took the big bass out of the ice chest and wedged a nice rock down in his throat as I skirted the store and came in from the back.  Hanging from the scales, he weighed a couple ounces better than seven pounds.  

Uncle Norten wasn’t fazed…   “Get that rock out of his throat,” he said.   Sure enough, the bass was a six and a half pounder, rockless.

It was a trick my uncle used on occasion when he was young, a guide on lakes like Norfork, Bull Shoals and Greers Ferry way back when those lakes were new.   He found ways to make his clients think their fish were bigger than they were.  He said he once got a 20-dollar tip because a fisherman who was trying his best to get a five-pound bass had one just a little short of that, and a rock about the size of a baseball pushed it over the top.

“Isn’t that dishonest?”  I asked him.  

Uncle Norten shook his head.  “Yeah, I reckon it is,” he said, but nothing about fishing is honest,” he said.  “You are trying to make a bass think something with a hook in it is a living meal of some kind.  That ain’t honest is it?”  I reckoned it wasn’t.

Then a few years later in March, we were back on the water again with spinner-baits after big bass. We were fishing an Ozark   reservoir that day. 

“I ain’t saying this water is exactly warm,” my Uncle told me.  “But it is WARMER than it was a couple or three weeks ago, and you don’t need warm, you just need warmer.”  Somehow, I think I understood that.

“Bass aren’t thinking about spawning,” he said, “ they’re just thinking about eating a little more.  Most of the really big ones might spend 23 hours a day out there in fifteen or twenty feet of water, but for an hour or so they might be up in three or four feet of water looking for something to eat, and if you are there fishing with a spinner-bait at that right time, you might hook into a bass so big he won’t need a rock in his gullet.”  

Fish that spinner-bait up off the bottom a little, keeping those spinners flashing ever so little.  In March, you fish it S-L-O-W.  As slow as you can anyway… you have to keep it off the bottom, and moving.

I always put a pork trailer of some kind on my spinner-baits, because I use a second hook, known as a trailer hook, which will come off if you don’t keep it above that pork rind on the primary hook.  I like a black or brown pork strip, usually five or six inches long, with a yellow skirt in March.  Some like chartreuse skirts, which is good in murky looking water, and some prefer white.  Of course in water that is very clear, fishing great big spinner-baits in March isn’t very productive.  But using them in murky water, green water, brown water, any water that is just a little hard to see down into, that’s when they work best.

It was about 2:00 p.m. that day years back, in March, back in a little cove with lots of standing timber and logs.  I guess a big bass had gotten tired of snoozing out in deep water under some ledge and decided to move into shallow water and look for an easy meal.  She saw my spinner-bait and about fifteen feet from my boat, not ten feet from the bank, and she nailed it.  She whacked it, clobbered it… nearly jerked the rod out of my hand!  I set the hook, and she tried to get her around a tree.  Fourteen-pound line stops that kind of maneuver.  

It was a blast, fighting that fish.  In the murky water on occasion I saw her broad light-colored side, wide as a boat paddle blade, her mouth, big enough to swallow a grapefruit.  I gave her just a little line against the drag, but soon had her beside the boat and I landed her. My uncle picked up my camera and took a picture for me.

“Seven and a half pounds, maybe eight,” I said.

“Maybe,” uncle Norten nodded, “ with a little rock.”

Get out on a warm day this month and fish a bassy-looking bank with an oversized spinner-bait.  You might catch a bass which doesn’t even need a rock in its gullet to be a genuine lunker. 

To contact me write to Box 22. Boliivar, Mo 65613 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com