Just me and a bunch of largemouths

Just me and a bunch of largemouths

While many fishermen wouldn’t rank largemouth bass anywhere near the top of a best-eating chart, I believe most of them would certainly put them well up a hard-fighting chart.

I haven’t kept a largemouth since Hector was a pup, but every summer I do spend at least a few outings fishing for what I consider to be one of the hardest fighters in the business.

Granted, pound for pound or ounce for ounce, I believe a smallmouth bass or a bluegill might outfight a largemouth, and most certainly northern pike and muskies have to rank very highly based on their fighting qualities as well.

If you ask me, and no one ever has, I consider the smallmouth bass the hardest-fighting of them all.

I am looked upon as an uneducated idiot whenever I argue with my musky fishing friends about relative fighting ability. To get their goat, I argue that if you tied a six-pound smallmouth bass tail to tail with a 20-pound musky, the smallmouth would drag the musky all over the lake.

Not wanting to start a real fight with anyone, I would instead like to use the following lines of this treatise to accord bass, both smallmouth and largemouth, their due kudos as to their fighting ability.

A day before writing these lines, I paddled my fishing kayak around most of a small, fortunately underfished lake that requires a portage just to get to it.

The lake — which shall go unnamed by me — is absolutely loaded with largemouth. Armed with my five-foot ultralight spinning rod, the reel spooled with four-pound test, I spent about two hours catching bass after bass after bass.

All were taken with a pinkish-orangish Mini Mite, which has proven its worth as a fish getter, not only for largemouth, but also for dandy-sized perch and bluegills as well.

I fished it as simply as I fished for panfish as a six-year-old kid would fish with a cane pole, suspending the Mini Mite below a one-inch bobber.

As I learned mere seconds after making my first cast, jiggling the plastic tail was not necessary. Quite often I casted almost up to the shoreline where many, many spawning beds were clearly seen in the water.

On my first cast, it took about five seconds for a bigmouth, which turned out to be a 14-incher, to grab my Mini Mite. The fight was on.

The fish might have been only 14 inches in length, but it fought like an — at least in its own mind — a six-pounder. Not much more than a little jiggling of the hook was needed to free the  “bigmouth” so it could be tossed back into the lake as quickly as it came out of it.

Paddling and drifting along several hundred yards of shoreline, dropping the Mini Mite almost up into the bushes, and in one place, blooming iris lining the shore, it was one bass after another grabbing it.

Most of the bass ranged from eight to 14 inches, with only one real dandy landed, that being a 19-incher that literally dragged the kayak through the calm water for about 50 yards or so before I was finally able to grab it by the lower lip.

Now then, as I might have mentioned earlier, I don’t care much for eating largemouth bass, though they aren’t considered outright bad table fare. The thing is, I like eating bluegills, perch, and northern pike much, much more.

For at least the two hours I spent wearing out two plastic tails for the Mini Mite jig, I had a fish on, probably no more than two or three minutes apart.

Maybe it was simply unfortunate, or maybe it was because the bluegill population in this particular lake has severely diminished, or maybe it was because the bluegills were in deeper water than I was fishing, or maybe it was that the bluegills just didn’t give a tinker’s damn about what I have always considered a mighty tasty looking plastic morsel of food, but I failed to hook a single bluegill the entire time I was on the water.

Perhaps the best thing about not catching any bluegills or keeping any bass was that I had no fish that would require filleting as soon as I got home.

Nope. This outing was strictly for fun. It was a return visit to a small lake I used to fish fairly often each summer. It was a lake where, as usual, I neither saw nor heard another human being the entire time I was there.

It was just a quiet time to spend alone — except for a drake mallard that swam away from me when I got within about 30 yards of it along a stretch of boggy shoreline in the back corner of the lake.

The thing is, little outings like this one, spent entirely with me being my only companion of the human kind all the time I was there, were, as always, a treasured time on the water.

I’d like to think it was the kind of outing all of us need and should take every now and then.