23 1/4-Inch Merrill Creek Reservoir Largemouth Bass From Shore

Most magazines take first-use rights, so well after a better photograph, in which the bass looks bigger, clears the legalities, I'll post that photo here.

My wife had never visited Merrill Creek Reservoir, so I offered her the opportunity, along with our son after he got off work today. We left Bedminster around 6:30 p.m.. It was too late for a hike, but we sat down on a nice "beach," as a passerby called it. I sized up the situation. To our right, sparse flooded timber, apparently open water in front of us. I reasoned that bass will frequent virtually any shoreline, and this stretch in front of us really wasn't bad with that wood in the water nearby. I cast my weightless Chompers far as I could and imagined it sinking through 20-foot depth, sunlit up top, nice and dark below, and then I propped my rod and reel on my camera bag, bail opened, lay back on the gravelly sand, closed my eyes and enjoyed sun on my skin.

Pretty soon, prompted by how it felt odd to be under gravity's power, I had a sort of weird vision about how mass and gravitation might "really" work. I started mumbling to my son, who had decided to lay back next to me, my son who knows everything physics, of course, as a physics major, this a Golden Opportunity for him to condescend to his dad. He didn't convince me about energy as the fundamental reality. "But energy has being," I said. I had seen gravitation in my mind's eye--a force--as merely following form. Stuff did not just glom together here to form this planet, on which I so perfectly lay back to take in the sun. The form preceded the existence. I was thinking that form sort of drew the stuff here. That would be gravitation, but only in the literal sense. I was really thinking of space itself as somehow formal. But "space" makes no sense without things, which to my mind begs a question about what space might be, not in terms of things like this planet, which has not existed here forever, but instead in terms of information that somehow precedes what comes about and gets established as reality. To put it simply doesn't explain anything, but of course, this planet never could have come into being, unless it possibly could come into being, before it actually did....

I didn't get further into it with Matt. After about 10 minutes of feeling really good about sandy gravel on the back of my head as implying gravity and certainly more than that somehow or other, I lazily sat up, reached to check my line, and for a moment was a little confused, because it seemed tight. Yeah, I had sized up the situation as possibly yielding a bass, but we came here to show Matt's mother the place, not actually get a fish on, and to have just walked up to the first spot we came upon at a 660-acre reservoir, 210 feet deep, that just isn't likely to yield fish.

I stood and found a fish was on for certain, made sure that hook was set, and felt that whatever this fish was, are there carp in Merrill Creek Reservoir? carp do hit plastic worms, it was pretty big, and now it was rising to leap, and when a largemouth came completely out, "eight pounds" flashed in my mind. I loosened the Penn's drag a little, because this bass was going to run, and it eventually did, once it saw the shore. Before it got near, it leapt once more, seeming almost as fat as long, and I was astonished a fish as overweight as it looked could clear the surface.

Hook secure, though, I subdued it, and Matt grasped the lower jaw not by thumb and forefinger, but with all four fingers and thumb curled underneath. She measured 23 1/4 inches with a fat belly, so correct me if I might be off a little about the weight, but I judged seven-and-a-half pounds. That secured hook actually caught on the upper lip, so I'm very sure this bass took the worm off bottom in the dark, after that worm sat there on bottom for about 10 minutes. And it must have hit about the moment I decided to get up and check my rod.

Sun ducked under the trees and we soon left. The gate closes at sunset.

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