There was no underestimating the size of the walleye I hooked. He was a dandy, five or six pounds a least and maybe bigger. You could see him easily as I fought him alongside the boat, with my fishing partner whackin’ at him with the dip net, something like a great blue heron would stab at a sunfish.
I just didn’t have my drag set properly on my reel. Most generally that is something I do at the beginning of every fishing trip, I check the drag on whatever I am fishing with. And you need to check the last few feet of your line for any nicks or abrasions. I am just getting too darned old to remember everything I guess, and I forgot to check either. When that walleye saw my fishing partner waving that net around like he was a highway department flagman, he really got wild, and he made a huge lunge for deep water and broke the line.
The lure was nothing of great importance, it was one of those four- or five-inch black and white minnows that look like the old Rapala lures, one that you can jiggle around on the surface or yank down under maybe three feet or so when you reel it in. I was catching some really hefty white bass on it. I had some good ones and one walleye just a little better than fifteen inches long. Then that big walleye came up from the depths and engulfed it and the fight was on. He won, and I lost my lure.
But I have several similar ones that are even better, lures referred to as ‘Rogues’. I tied one of them on and kept fishing. And I didn’t throw my hat on the boat floor and utter an expletive and moan about that lost walleye like my fishing partners have seen me do before. A fisherman with my experience gets use to losing big fish on occasion when using light line and a switch for a fishing rod.
You don’t become a grizzled old outdoorsman like me without watching big fish disappear in the depths on occasion, leaving you limp-rodded. You just figure God had a better purpose for that fish than a sizzling destination in my frying pan. You have to occasionally blame the Great Creator for your dirty rotten luck as a fisherman, unless you want to blame yourself for not checking the drag on your reel or not replacing old line.
But now we are coming to the unbelievable part. I tied on that other lure, just like the one I lost except different, and almost an hour later down the river about a half mile, I made a cast and when I reeled the lure back, it had hooked and retrieved the one I lost. I swear folks, that is the truth! When I reeled it back in the boat, the one which broke off and last seen in the toothy jaw of that big walleye, was dangling from the back hook of the new one I tied on to replaced it!!! It sounds like something an outdoor writer might make up? But honest, I swear on the life of my best coon dog and my camouflaged War-Eagle boat. If I am lying, may it have a hole in the bottom it, and may my Ugly-Stick break right in the middle!!
My fishing partners both ‘seen it themselves’, and you can ask them, a couple of the most honest men I ever met! But we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait ‘til you hear this! I tied that old lure back on, and reset my drag so that it was perfect. And I started catching white bass again. Its a drizzly, dark afternoon and one of my fishing partners caught two walleye that were 16 to 19 inches in length, fish that my previously lost lunker might have sired in his earlier days.
And nearly two miles down the river from where I lost that big walleye, and a mile and a half from where I miraculously recovered my lost lure, I cast it out into a deep eddy below a shoal and a huge fish engulfed it only four or five feet from the end of my rod. He looked like a monster coming up from the depths. He stripped four or five feet of line against the drag and I told my fishing partners I was about to lose that lure a second time in two hours!
But this time, one of them got the net under that big walleye and it was mine. I don’t know how much it weighed but it was 25 inches long and hefty. I knew that the Great Creator was trying to let me know how sorry he was that I had lost the first one. Maybe the fact that I am trying so hard not to cuss as much when I lose a fish is paying dividends. Or maybe He just decided it was that second big walleye’s time to finally sizzle in my frying pan, as he would, soon.
Maybe that second lunker wasn’t as deserving as the first, I can’t say. But that two hours and the course of events in which a lost lure was found, and a second lunker walleye was hooked on it, certainly makes a man think; something I don’t do a lot of.
I swear this story is the truth, all of it. It happened in February a couple of years back. I can show you that lure. It has big tooth marks all over it!
The above story is an excerpted chapter from the book “Recollections of an Ol-Fashioned Angler” To get an autographed copy call my office at 417 777 5227 or email us at lightninridge47@gmail.com See all my books and magazines on the website… larrydablemont.com
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