Bassin'!!

Retail Therapy meets Horsepower in the Dirty South. .

I came home one day this spring to news from my lovely girlfriend Marsha.

“I bought the boat”

I didn’t say much. If my warnings on used boats went unheeded, there wasn’t much to say about it now. There’s worse things in life than having to go to the lake in summer and zip around in a boat someone else paid for.

Here’s the problem. I don’t enjoy zipping around. I’m a quiet sports guy- fly fishing, kayaking, bowhunting, hiking, birding. But Marsha and I are in a committed long-term relationship with a wedding somewhere at the end of this rainbow- you make things work.

The boat in question is a 1997 Pro Craft Fish’n’Ski, meaning it’s a bass boat with extra seating. It has a 150 horse Mercury 2-cycle engine, and while I definitely prefer modern four-stroke outboards, the smell of that 2-cycle smoke brings me back to my childhood bass fishing out of a john boat with briny old men who smell of Swisher Sweets.

And guess what? I didn’t actually hate it. C’mon, here in the Deep, Dirty South who is going to complain about being on a lake in the dog days of summer?

My problem is I just get bored, and you put me in any setting outdoors and I will quickly tune out of the human world and start trying to figure out the ecosystem, and the lacustrine ecosystem down here revolves around one species- BASS!

BASS my friend! For most of my sojourn in the South I have avoided bass, not because I don’t like them, but because I don’t have the tools to fish for them here. Believe it or not I fished for bass on a regular basis in Michigan, and not just smallmouths. Michigan is replete with shallow weedy lakes full of local native largemouth bass, the bass that bass boats are built for, the bass that B.A.S.S. was built on.

Up north you didn’t need a bass boat. A canoe would do, and after I made my transition to fly fishing, I found that both largemouth and smallmouth bass were very receptive to flies, and accessible by the craft I had. I didn’t write about it much, but bass were a regular part of my fishing for a long time.

Things are different here in the South, at least in Northeast Georgia. There are no shallow weedy lakes, only large reservoirs that cover tens of thousands of acres. You can be in 150 feet of water a couple hundred feet from shore in some spots. There’s no weedline, but there’s hundreds of miles of shoreline. How do you cover all that, find fish, and have any measure of success?

Then Marsha buys this boat, like God stooped from heaven and handed me the keys to the Kingdom. All of a sudden I had access.

The one problem was I’m a fly guy, not a gear guy. I didn’t even own conventional gear. How do I bridge this knowledge and hardware gap, figure out where the fish are and start belting out 100 foot casts to ravenous bait-busting bass?

The answer was shopping. I decided to adopt an old strategy which worked for me before. It consisted of fishing with gear until I had enough money to buy fly gear. In this process I learned such things as where to find fish and how to fish stealthily. Then I took this knowledge to fly fishing. In this new situation I already had the fly gear, but no knowledge of the lakes. I decided buying some gear and some bass lures was in order, just to learn the lakes. Just to get my feet wet.

Then came the questions- what rods do I buy? What reels? Are the purple curly tail plastic worms of my youth still in vogue? What is a Ned rig? What exercises must I do so to strengthen my back for those Bassmaster hooksets?

To find out I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole, namely that of one Brian Latimer. I’m glad I did. He is very knowledgeable and very approachable. The fact he placed in some tournaments didn’t hurt.

What I took away from this research was one key term- shaky head worm.

I went to Bass Pro Shops (or Cabela’s?) in Lawrenceville and bought exactly $550 worth of gear- two rod/reel combos, some line, a net, a tackle box already due for retirement due to being too small, and about 48 packages of various sizes of soft plastic baits, hard plastic lures, weights, hooks, swivels, snaps, and something called a Carolina Keeper, which sounds like something you pick up at the local chickenwire bar after a couple too many pops.

I walked out of that store reborn. I entered a hayseed Yankee, and exited a hayseed Southerner. My transition complete, I went home, lined my reels, sorted my new lures into the bins of my new tackle box, and plotted my next moves.

Bass fishing has it all- octane and horsepower, retail therapy, redemption in the outdoors, shiny boats that cost more than your car, its own jargon, and even a wardrobe I’ll describe as Aquatic Golfer.

The next weekend Marsha and I hit the lake. We went to a point out of the wind where Marsha could sunbathe on her floaty while I did some casting. Remembering the wise words of Brian Latimer, I rigged up a shaky head 3/8 ounce jig with a 7 inch green pumpkin shaky head worm from Zoom (full disclosure: I know and work for the owner but we have no relationship in the realm of fishing.) I caught a bass on my second cast.

Since then my results have varied. As the season and boat repairs dragged on I started seeing surface activity and started smashing some bass on a Zara Spook. I even caught my first white bass. We blew up the engine on the boat and spent ten hours over four weekends just driving the boat around to break in the new powerhead. Then deer season began and I forgot all about bass fishing.

But now we live in the age of climate change, and a few weeks ago I was home again, and the weather was too warm to hunt. We took the boat out one last time. By now I had at least some control over my foot pedal trolling motor. We cruised to a spot in the lake I knew was close to the main channel, but had some shallow bays out of the wind. I cut the engine and dropped the trolling motor.

I cast the Zara Spook to the color line off a retaining wall. It disappeared with a glug and a splash.

Fish on.

While for most of America warm weather fishing on lakes is over, Brian Latimer says the best months of the year to fish Lake Hartwell are January through May, so I’ll be getting out there to see what I can find. Wish me luck.

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