The advantage of catching fish nearby is the blessing they bestow on home. You would never think of it from an attitude of ingratitude, but if you fish hard, you owe it to yourself to allow the feeling. The compensation is the least you deserve after all the effort you put in.
Having to drive only 18 miles round trip is easy. With Matt and Brenden the other day, I drove 110. No complaint. I like a long trip. And I enjoy the rough and tumble of car-topping a big, heavy canoe on a little Honda Civic. But to have it easy, too, is like breathing freely.
I prefer catching my smallmouths on lures. If I really preferred live bait, I'd use it more often than I do, but after trying to catch fluke on killies, I like to bring the remainder in the bucket home for the bass. Yesterday, I also had a couple of containers of nightcrawlers leftover from fishing the Delaware with Brian Peterson and his daughter Kelsey. I ended up catching the first and smaller bass on an unweighted nightcrawler. I also caught a 15 1/2-incher, on a killie I live-lined without weight.
I loosened the drag as I fought the big one because I feared the knot would pop. I had no particular reason to fear that, but the fish fought very hard. I use six-pound mono on the rivers when I'm fishing the bass. (Last December I caught a 4.23-pound rainbow trout on four-pound test.) The odd thing is that I did not honor my fear, because I did nothing about it, once I had landed and released the bass. I behaved as if my fear had been unrealistic.
Don't we often doubt ourselves insidiously like that? So insidiously we let it go entirely...while the object of our fear works its way out entirely without our knowing. Or until, in the final moments of the eventuality, it occurs to us once more, emerging from the forgotten background. We really have more control over things than we credit ourselves for, if we would just take that control.
Having waded upstream and sat on the concrete ledge of an old bridge abutment, I found a Senko that had to have been left behind recently, because not taken by flood water. I had seen lots of boot prints downstream, and I thought of how hammered these bass must be. These bass. I had another one on but when I set the hook, I got no grab. Soon though, I had a fairly nice one hooked up. I had fought the fish until I got it close to me, a bass of about 12 inches, when I thought of the knot popping again. Seconds later--it popped. Right in front of me. Almost at my feet.
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