Fishing Forum

Once again Stuart had a break from his chemo treatments and wanted to go fishing. I had no idea what the nuke held, but we decided on that for today's spot since he has done well there. Maybe next time we'll get below a dam for some white bass (stripe, not stripper) and a smallmouth or two.<br /><br />Beautiful, beautiful day. Just a tad windy, making it a bit tougher to drift, but we found fish. Nothing over a good eating size, with the big fish (by Stuart) at 10 pounds. Great temperatures, and the water ran from 82 to 84 degrees. Flow was moderate at the mid-20,000's, but jumped up to 47,000 or so after a while.<br /><br />I started us off with the first 3 fish of the day, and maintained the lead throughout the trip. Stuart, having none of that without a fight, took the big fish honors and tried making a run at catching the most fish. When he got too close to my total, I reached over to adjust his drag and, umm, "accidentally" flipped the free-spool lever on his reel while he was fighting a fish. A truly fantastic bird's nest immediately sprang up on his reel and I was positive I had protected my lead. Instead, while expressing his thoughts on the subject in no uncertain terms, he proceeded to reel over the tangle and caught the fish! He then made me pick out the bird nest. (FYI, 80 lb mono is extremely easy to pick out. Likely wouldn't be a good idea to do this to your buddy who is using braid..........................). After he threatened to smite me about the head and neck with the butt end of his Ugly Stik, I used much more finesse in the war for the most fish and simply had "trouble" controlling the trolling motor - must be a weak remote control battery?? - until he noticed the trouble did not occur when I had a fish on. Hell, I thought he had gotten more senile than that.<br /><br />We traded family news, reminisced about some of our fishing trips of the past, and told lies big enough to be instantly recognizable as such so they could be properly appreciated. I believe we ended up the day with a total of 28 cats. To finish off the day, when we got back to the ramp, there was about a 6 pound black stray cat sitting under my truck. I claimed it first and added it to my "cat" total for the day. It was, as were the rest of the cats, safely released.<br /><br />