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hang out, hoping to feast on some smaller, unsuspecting fellow, hiding in the weeds. What were you using?
I will tell you exactly what I was using. It was a number 5, Blue Fox, with a bright blue bell and a silver spinner. On the back of that, I had a yellow curly tail. I cast right up close to the shore, in the rocks, and retrieved as slowly as I dared, to test the depth of the water and get the lure as deep as possible without snagging the bottom.
The hit was almost immediate. I knew this was a quality fish. I told Oscar we needed the net for this one, and after a bit the fish tired enough to get him in the boat. He weighed exactly 8 pounds on scales that were brand new, a gift from my son, who couldn’t make this trip, but didn’t want me coming home with teles of 10 pound pike if they had been weighed on the rusty old De-Liar I keep in my tackle box.
Just across from the small island, towards the shore, there was another weed bed. We figured there must be a deep channel between the island and the shore, and started fishing that, moving towards the weeds on the opposite shore.
Not two casts later, I struck another good fish. He was also a dandy. He fought well and hard, but eventually came to hand. This one weighed 10 pounds, and, to say the least, I was very pleased.
The big fish
of long ago
I never felt like I was in competition with M.H.’s 10 pound pike, but, nevertheless, that had been the high water mark for sometime. As a matter of fact, competition with my older brothers has rarely been a factor in any area. I recall one incident quite vividly, when Charles and I were bowhunting with some friends of his in Shenandoah County. ‘
I could sling some pretty good arrows in those days, and while practicing one day in camp, one of Charles’ friends tried to razz him a bit, and said, “What are you going to do if your little brother gets a bigger deer than you do?”
He never hesitated. He smiled and said, “I’ll be proud, and I’ll say that was my brother who did that.” As it turns out, he got a buck that trip, and I got nothing. Enough said.
My 10 pounder, however, had recently acquired some of his heft. As I was holding the fish, using long, needle nosed pliers to get the lure free, sticking out of his gullet was the tail of his latest meal. The tail of that fish was easily three inches wide. Which leads me to conclude that he struck my lure out of instinct, and hunger had nothing to do with it.
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