The ones that wouldn’t get away

Funniest fishing stories involve bass that refused to swim freely

The bass was jumping. Then it was diving.

Then it was racing for the boat. Then it went under the boat, and even made a run at the big motor at the back of the boat.

This was Friday (April 11), and my heart was racing with its every move.

And, then it was broken, my heart that is, along with the 14-pound fluorocarbon line that snapped in the middle of the man vs. bass fight, which for the moment appeared to have been lost by me.

“$#&*%^##$@%&!” I hollered, and, no, we can’t translate that here in this public forum. Nor can we repeat the next four or five words that I uttered. Even my fishing partner, Pete Ponds, said a dirty word, probably since it was his $15 lure that the fish had stolen.

But …

What followed over the next 10 seconds is one of the funniest things I have ever seen while fishing. Not the funniest, but we’ll get to that later.

“Bet he jumps trying to throw that lure,” said Ponds, the Elite Series pro from Madison. “They usually do, unless it has already come out of his mouth.”

Sure enough, a second or two later, the big fish, all 5 pounds of it, came flying up 10 feet from us, shaking its head back and forth before splashing back down. The chartreuse sides of the lure were clearly visible.

“I never saw it come out,” I told Ponds. “He’s still hooked.”

Said Ponds: “Maybe he’ll jump again.”

Boated, the hard way

Then it happened.

The big fish made another leap, this time right next to the boat, bounced once on the gunnel (gunwhale), and landed with a thud on the front deck near Ponds’ feet.

“$#&*%^##$@%&!” I hollered again.

Ponds, to his everlasting credit, dove down on the fish and got it in a half-grab, half-smother position, preventing its escape.

“Got it,” was all he said when he came up holding the fish by its lower lip. “Here’s your fish.”

It was a happy ending, with one exception. At the end, when the fish made contact on the side of the boat before landing on the deck, Ponds’ lure was tossed, and we never found it.

As crazy as that sounds, I have an odder one from years ago, and it is one of the first stories I wrote as an outdoor writer. It comes from a day, back when I was married to wife No. 1 and we lived in Hattiesburg. We loved to fish, but lacked the means to own a boat or a lot of equipment, so we did most of our bass fishing on small ponds where either boats were available to rent or the landowner had one we could use. Our lures were limited to plastic worms and minnows for bass, and cane poles and crickets for bream.

We fished for fun and entertainment, for sure, but we also fished to eat. Our food budget depended on at least one or two good trips a month to keep our bellies filled.

One fine spring afternoon, we were on a small pay-to-fish private lake near the community of Runnelstown. We had the extra $5 needed for a rental boat and had borrowed a trolling motor and battery from a friend.

It was a beautiful day and we had fun, catching a few small bass that we tossed back and a few bluegill. We would have to eat hamburgers at a drive-thru because we lacked having a mess for a fish fry.

As we used the last bit of battery power to slowly motor back across the lake, she in the front of the boat with her back to me, and me in the back at the tiller, we were not exactly leaving a wake as we headed toward a beautiful sunset.

Boated, the easy way

All of a sudden, a small bream launched itself from the water beside the boat and flew right across my legs and landed in the lake on the other side.

A second later, a big ol’ bass, about 7 pounds, bigger than anything I’d ever caught up to that date, came flying on the same route. She was so big that gravity was not her friend, and her girth was such that she was, well, aerodynamically challenged.

She landed on half on my leg and half on the bottom of the metal boat.

“THUD!” she said.

“$#&*%^##$@%&!” I said (noticing a pattern there yet?).

“What the heck are you doing back there,” said wife No. 1, as she turned to see the commotion.

By then, I had grabbed the shocked bass by the lip and was holding it up.

“You are not going to believe this,” I told my wife, “but look what I caught.”

And, of course, she did not believe it, nor should she have, since all our fishing gear was all put up on the bottom of the boat.

Instead of explaining it to her, I instead spoke only to the bass.

“I appreciate the effort and your generosity, but this is not how the game is played,” I said. “You are not supposed to just jump in the boat.”

With that, I just slid the bass back in the water.

“$#&*%^##$@%&!” hollered wife No. 1, “have you lost your mind? That was our dinner.”