Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 12 · column 4 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
carrying rods and reels and nets and tackle boxes and all the other paraphernalia that we intelligent homo sapiens need to outwit a cold-blooded, prehistoric fish, that should be as dumb as a box of hammers, but really isn’t.
The lake
Then, out in the middle of nowhere, we came upon this beautiful lake, that looked like something out of a fairy tale. By Rappahannock standards, it was a huge lake. Brandon dismissed it as a pot hole. All I know is, it had weed beds and rocks and deep channels, and whatever else a pike needs to call it a nice place to live. After a bit of muscle power to get the boat off the trailer and into the water, we were ready to fish. Brandon wished us well, and rode away on the quad, leaving the trailer and us to our own devices.
As I had been the motorman for the two previous days, Oscar took that position, and I got the front of the boat, Teady to do battle with whatever the lake
had to offer. Now, the guy in
back gets to fish, too. But,
because most of the folks I
go fishing with were raised
on bass fishing, which is
cast and retrieve, and we
tend to carry over that
method when we fish for
pike, being in the front of
the boat is an advantage.
The only thing we knew
about this lake was a tale we
had heard second or third hand, that early this year, after ice out, the game warden had checked two guys walking out from this lake, and he said the pike^they had, if they had been carrying them in a wheelbarrow, would have stuck out both ends of the wheelbarrow. That fish tale could well have been true. But that really didn’t make any difference. Brandon had said fish this lake, there are big pike here. Nothing else mattered.
We fished for about an hour and a half, and had picked up several nice pike, about two feet long, and maybe 5 pounds, around the larger of the two islands on the lake. Then we headed for the upper part of the lake, and a smaller island. As we approached the island, I could see weed beds along the shore, and then rocks descending from the shore, with no weeds. This usually means the water is too deep for the weeds, and can be a good transition place for large, predatory fish to
93.5%