An Incident at Clevenger Cove

 

       As a seventeen-year old freshman at School of the Ozarks College in the mid-60s I studied fishing mostly! With Tablerock Lake so close and my having a key to the gate and boat on the School’s property at a place called Clevinger Cove, you knew where I would be on the weekends.  If I couldn’t get home to the Big Piney and didn’t have to work on campus friends and I would often spend Friday and Saturday nights there on Clevinger Cove in an old abandoned house. We’d spend hours paddling around Tablerock  Lake in an old v-bottom boat fishing for anything we could catch.

       That was back when the first Rapala lures were becoming famous and somehow I got one, an old sample from my Uncle Norten.  My uncle had caught an 11-pound 4-ounce bass from Clevinger Cove years before I ever fished it.  It was published in Sports Afield Magazine as the biggest bass caught that year in the whole country.  

       Norten was addicted to big spinner baits, so I got some lures he was given, because of that magazine’s recognition. One was that black and silver Rapala about 6 or 7 inches long. On a Saturday morning when the lake was high from spring rains I tied it on and paddled back up into the end of the cove where a big green bush of some kind stuck up out of the water. 

       I couldn’t cast it a long way with that old Shakespeare reel and braided line but just that once it went back a little farther than intended and the line draped over the end of that bush. I gave it a jerk or two to try to free it and that Rapala lure danced enticingly on the surface just past the bush.

      Sometimes when a bass hits a topwater lure there is just a boil of water on the surface and he slurps it under with a minimum of commotion.  At such times I think the bass is just hungry and wanting a good meal. But after all, bass are predators and I am fairly sure that at times they just want to put on a show because they are mad as well as hungry. 

       That day, at the end of Clevenger Cove, there was a mad bass laying beside a log just beneath that green bush.  He didn’t want to just eat my Rapala he wanted to hurt it. And so my lure disappeared in a spray of water that came up a foot into the air with that big slab-sided bass. He crashed down on top of it carrying it beneath that bush before I could even bend the rod real good. I gave it a good pull and set the hook enough to feel that he was a monster of a fish as far as the fight he put up. But I figure he laughed to himself as he burrowed beneath that greenery and somehow got my line beneath the log.  I just hope those treble hooks hurt his jaw for a long time after he broke my leader.  That’ll learn  him!

       Actually it was more likely a ‘she’ than a ‘he’.  Bigger and fatter and meaner bass are almost always females.  And I am not insinuating anything here; but what the heck, females don’t read outdoor columns anyway do they?

       I have an even better story about Clevenger cove that I published in a book entitled “Prince of Point Lookout…Life and Learning at School of the  Ozarks”.  I worked for the President, Dr. M. Graham Clark back then and he asked me to take him and a very rich lady fishing one fall day there in the old boat in the big cove beside school property.  

       Her name was Nettie Marie Jones, who was a major donor to S of O.  I’ll write about that in another column sometime, how she caught a big bass that day herself.  That afternoon may have played a part in the building of a big structure now known as the Nettie Marie Jones Learning Center, there at the school.

You can find that book and others at website…www.larrydablemont.com