A Once-In-A Lifetime Fish

My first attempt at a selfie. Twenty inch, six pound smallmouth

A mixed stringer, 20-inch walleye & yellow perch 

       Rotten luck, that’s all you can call it!  The day before my birthday, in mid- October, I was fishing in Canada, way out in the Lake of the Woods, and found a great spot for walleye in a remote wilderness spot.  I was catching a lot of them, many between 18 and 20 inches long; hard-fighting glassy-eyed rascals, with some 12-inch yellow perch mixed in.   Who could ask for a better day?  There I was in a peaceful and beautiful setting, out of the wind without another boat or human within miles. 

      At the edge of darkness I started my motor and headed for my cabin, six miles away, with a cold wind in my face and strong waves buffeting my boat.  I was there 5 or 6 days and the temperature stayed above 40 degrees the whole time, never more than a 15 mph wind.  Canada at its best!  Most years in mid October I am there, elated with fishing and grouse hunting and getting some writing done. At the dawn of my birthday, October 11, I walked down to my boat and found that the starter on my motor was done for. Fried… done for.  Rotten luck!  But… if it had happened the night before I would have been sleeping on a nearby sand beach, trying to keep a fire going, listening to the howl of timber wolves on Wolf Island.  An adventure to write about, perhaps fending off a pack of timber wolves.   But no!  Darn rotten luck!

      There I was, below my cabin at the dawn of my birthday, with no outboard motor. I headed for Tinker Helseth’s nearby lodge to tell him I was on my way back to Missouri.  Tinker’s son-in-law recommended that I just go fish for smallmouth bass on a nearby small lake, where I could get around with only my trolling motor. I have fished that lake before, putting in with my War-Eagle boat down a little lane that few know about. When I did, I caught dozens of big smallmouth, one after another, just drifting across a windy rocky point.  Few lakes in Canada have shown me such smallmouth fishing.  I have never seen another boat on it.  Amazing!  

      In October last year I caught lots of smallmouth there above four pounds and two or three at five pounds or close.  In Canada, an eighteen-inch smallmouth will outweigh the same length bass from the Ozarks streams by nearly a pound.  I remember a spot off the point

point where I have found many big bass

where I hooked and lost a giant brownie that I thought might be the biggest I had ever hooked.  Was he still there?  He was…  In almost the same spot, I hooked him again, or one like him.  He nearly took my light-action spinning outfit with him when he hit.  But I had the single-hook jig set well, and I loosened my drag, hoping the six-pound line would hold.  

      He made hard and powerful dives and runs that took him 20 feet away from the boat, and that rod arced like I had never seen it bow.  Just a few minutes before I had hooked a 6- or 7-pound northern, and landed it.  When you have fished Canadian waters for forty years as I have, you learn to tell the difference in the struggle of a northern pike and a smallmouth.  I had no doubt the fish struggling below me, making my drag whine, was a brownie.  

      Your impulse is to horse them a bit, but this once I used my head.  I knew I would never see him if I didn’t let him wear himself out.  It took about ten minutes, but he did wear down, and finally I saw him about three feet beneath me in that clear water, broadside.  I nearly lost my composure…almost jumped in after him!  Thank goodness that starter had went out.  Because of that I was about to land the largest smallmouth of my life.  I made a swipe at the monster with my net, and missed him. I figured that miss would reinvigorate the bass, maybe let him escape. That’s what usually happens when you miss. But swipe number two brought him into the boat, and I sat there looking at the first six-pound smallmouth I have ever landed. He was flopping on the floor of my boat on my birthday.  I don’t keep smallmouth now, as I did when I was young and my family about lived on fish and ducks and rabbits and squirrel. But I would keep this one.  I drove to a small grocery store in Nestor Falls Ontario to have it weighed.  Six pounds, four ounces the lady said.  

       That night Tinker's family had a birthday dinner for me. It was a great meal with birthday cake and ice cream, and a half-dozen folks embarrassed me but singing that happy birthday song. I think it was the first time I have ever had anyone sing 'happy birthday' to me since my girls were little. And it was the first time, after more than sixty-five years of trying, that have caught a six-pound smallmouth. All that is left to do is try for a seven-pounder over the next twenty years or so.