BRAD DYE: The one that got away

The memory is still vivid. I was fishing alone in our two-man “bass camp” at Speck’s watershed late one evening after getting off work from my summer job.

After launching the boat, I had fished the creek run on the upper end of the lake and had just finished fishing my way down the run along the levee past the spillway. Along the way, I caught several nice bass in the two-to-five-pound range on a black curly-tailed Mr. Twister worm.

It was the perfect afternoon spent alone on the lake enjoying the waning days of summer before heading back to college without a care in the world. Did life get any better? I thought not.

As I made my way toward a familiar hot spot in the willows alongside a curve in the old creek, I noticed movement in the water as baitfish began scattering ahead of the wake of a largemouth bass.

I tossed the Texas-rigged worm just in front of the commotion at the edge of the willows and let it sink to the bottom before giving it a slight twitch. With the second twitch, I could feel the bass take the worm. As I watched the line begin moving quickly to the left, I reared back with a solid hook set. The fight was on.

Over the years in my memory, I have stretched the duration of this epic bass battle into a timeframe that would make Santiago’s three day battle with the Marlin in “The Old Man and the Sea” seem trivial.

In truth, I know that the fight probably lasted less than a minute. However, to this day, I am still haunted by how it ended. The behemoth began to tire (or so I thought) and near the boat, and I began to visualize the glory shots to come.

I would probably make the front page of the New Albany Gazette with this leviathan. The Tupelo Journal would probably send out a reporter to get the full story. I didn’t know how much it would cost to have a fish mounted, but I was about to find out.

My left arm was shaking as it held the rod while I reached down with my right hand to get the net—I wasn’t taking any chances with this monster. As the fish surfaced, I realized that my dreams were in fact about to come true.

This really was the biggest bass that I had ever caught and to this day would probably still be my largest, if I had only landed him, that is. With my rod in one hand and the net in the other, I reached out toward this freshwater Moby Dick and suddenly heard a loud crack.

Quickly, I looked down to see my Daiwa baitcaster fall into the water with a sickening “ploop.” My rod had split at the point of the handle where the reel attached. The pistol grip was still in my left hand and, fortunately, the remainder of the rod had fallen onto the side of the boat where it see-sawed precariously up and down.

I dropped the net and grabbed the rod and line and began pulling the reel back to the surface. The bass seized upon the moment of chaos and made a beeline for the willows where he proceeded to wrap the line and snap it in two. He was gone, along with my dreams of front-page glory.

I think about “Ole Bucketmouth” often, especially on the occasion of losing a good fish. “Mr. Nickelscales” still haunts me to this day, even though that was well over thirty-four years ago.

“But that’s the way with angling…” Luke Jennings wrote in “Blood Knots,” his fantastic book about fishing, “…for every fisherman there’s a ghost fish that along with the memory of the knot that slipped, the line that snapped, or the hook hold that gave will haunt his dreams forever.”

Sometimes, it’s the flash of a fish at the fly that lingers hauntingly in my memory. Last May, we had just set out on the third and final day of an Idaho flyfishing trip on the South Fork of the Snake River and were making a fast drift pass along the first section of the river.

I was fishing the back of the boat with Dan in the front and my first cast had been spot on, which set up a perfect drift along the edge of an undercut bank.

The flash of the huge brown trout is still etched in my memory. For a moment he was there as I stripped line through the bowed rod and then, just as fast, he shook free and disappeared back into the depths from whence he had come.

I’ve never been much of a golfer, but my golfing friends tell me that even during a bad round of golf, there’s always one good shot that brings them back to play again.

For me, that good golf shot comes in the flash of a brown trout in a clear mountain river, or the sight and sound of a largemouth bass leaping from the water rattling a buzzbait in its bucketmouth.

Memories like these have me itching for my next sunrise on the water. Until next time, here’s to the flash, to the one that got away, and here’s to seeing you out there in our great outdoors.

Email outdoors columnist Brad Dye at [email protected].

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