quiet cove, tiny waves lapped at the hull and a hint of pink flirted with pine trees on the eastern shore. Grandfather looked back at us and opened the engine.
Everything tranquil about the morning ceased as the motor exploded into a deafening whine. The bow pointed momentarily at the tops of the brightening pines and gradually settled as the boat planed. To a seven-year-old, 35 miles-per-hour in an open boat felt like a rocket sled. I beamed at Dad and we exchanged thumbs-up, our baseball hats turned backwards. Streaking across the lake, we arrived watery-eyed and no longer half-asleep.
It was without question worth all of the time, energy, and money it took to get us to that creek mouth at the absolute perfect time. Of course, this is easy for me to say because it involved very little of my time, energy, or money to get us there. The three of us paused as the boat settled and re-acclimated to the eerie silence floating on the water. Sun-bleached, moss-coated tree stumps so closely lined the banks of the old stream that you could read its former transit 15 feet below the surface of the lake. The mist had nearly dissipated despite the fact that we had yet to see the sun.
The moment ended suddenly as a heavy bass rolled through lily pads within casting distance of the boat. The morning held such tantalizing promise that each of us expected to land a giant fish with each cast. Grandfather dropped the trolling motor into the brown water, slid between two ghostly old switch hickory trees guarding the creek mouth, and started fishing.
Casting was an art with which I was largely unfamiliar at that early age. My first effort clanked hollowly off a table-sized stump and the open-faced reel buzzed angrily and belched a nest of tangled monofilament. I stared at the reel, frozen, not wanting to believe what had just happened. Dad and Grandfather were plugging away and it took a few moments for them to realize my situation. My father calmly stripped the line out of the snarled mess, explaining as he went until the reel turned smoothly, and he tousled my hair.
As I recovered from the ignominious opening, Grandfather reared back powerfully and his rod bent. I dove for the net, scattering life jackets and worn water jugs. After a short struggle, he swung the two-pound largemouth over the side of the boat and tossed it into my lap.
“Save that net for his Daddy,” he smiled softly and rigged another plastic worm with an ease that revealed his 60 years on the water. I grinned sheepishly and dropped the frisky bass rattling into the live well.
The sun peeked golden eyes through the pines and melted a little magic off the morning. Fifty casts without a fish while they each boated several nice ones also brought a dose of reality. The water grew shallower as we wound deeper up the old creek, now completely obscured from the main part of the lake by ragged stumps.
I alone stayed with a top-water lure. Bass feed most actively at the surface around sunrise and sunset, hitting bugs and frogs, minnows and sunfish, and occasionally small birds on overhanging limbs. As the sun climbs, they tend to drift back under lily pads, rocks, and ledges, striking only when prey ventures too close. It is then advisable to go under the surface after them. At eight o’clock that morning, fishless, I kept throwing a clunky top-water lure called a buzz-bait.
I am not sure what sort of natural creature this lure is supposed to mimic. Mine was about four inches long with a yellow plastic skirt, a giant white eye, and a gaudy propeller on the front that churned the water ferociously. I have never seen any sort of frantic, mutant, wide-eyed, skirted animal that so bubbles the water. Bass hit lures like that out of aggression rather than predation. That they attack them with such anger is really what makes them so fun to fish.
I plugged away, buzzing tree stumps and lily pads, sometimes cacophonously rattling the lure off the rusted metal roofs of decaying boat houses that once stood by the creek before they dammed the river. I’m surprised more people don’t drop dead when bass hit top-water lures on breathless mornings. My heart erupted as a fish lunged from behind a sideways limb and slapped the buzz bait into the air.
“Keep reeling! He’ll hit it again!” advised Grandfather.
Luckily, I was in such shock from the ambush that I never thought to stop reeling. The fish did hit it again, this time dragging the contraption beneath the water surface.
“Now let him have it!”
I leaned back and felt the hook set solid. The weight of the fish pulling straight away felt in perfect balance and for just a second the fight seemed marvelously even, the outcome uncertain. Quickly though, the graphite rod and 12-pound-test monofilament overwhelmed the foot-long bass and I guided it into the net, despite excitedly stepping into my own open tackle box.
I had caught fish before, but this was the first with a lure on one of the early morning bass trips with the men. When my father framed the black-green and white fish against the blazing Texas sun, it was without question the proudest moment of my young life.
I spent much of the rest of that morning admiring the fish in the live well, keeping track of mine as Dad and Grandfather steadily added more, lifting them myself, between instructions not to, over the open live well until my thumbs were tattered from their rough lower jaws. The water became inches deep and the trolling motor choked thick with Parrot’s feather moss. The pine trees towered above us as we poled the boat around, sinking oars through two feet of muck.
Was this it? Were we simply going to turn weakly around and leave? Grandfather cleaned off the motor and we turned our backs to the trees and headed out with a little less wonder. The fishing slowed as the sun flamed higher into the late morning sky. My rod laid largely silent and the live well open as we coiled back toward the lake.
One of the remarkable things about my father is that he never gives up. The man is relentless, whether deer hunting through a howling sand storm, hiking steadily through icy rain down a Montana trout stream, or casting endlessly into the heat of the day. It paid off that morning as the Hellbender crankbait he was retrieving stopped cold and his rod angled deeply. The thick bass powered away, pulling him to the side of the boat, and got behind a tree. Grandfather smoothly positioned the boat, Dad, me, and the net for the next five minutes until the 6 lb. largemouth bass was improbably hoisted into the noon sunlight.
Though the rocket ride back across the lake was exhilarating, I kept peeking into the live well at the jostled fish banging into one another. I burst onto the dock before the boat had completely stopped and raced up the ramp to the cabin. Breathless, I pulled my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother down to the dock. Scrambling back into the boat, I pulled the fish one by one from the live well, recounting how and where each was caught.
We hung fourteen bass on two stringers that weighed over fifteen pounds each and held them up for their cameras. Dad and I compared tattered thumbs and Grandfather pulled me next to him as we walked proudly through 100 degree soup back to the two-room cabin.
The frigid air hit us like ice water. Lying flat on my cot, fully clothed with beads of crystallized sweat on my brow, I drifted quickly off to sleep. The rhythmic dripping from the duct-taped air conditioner onto sizzling pavement outside the window reminded me of white caps slapping the boat as we raced back across the open water.
After a nap, we ate warm brisket sandwiches on Mrs. Baird’s white bread and fried peach pies with black coffee. The morning’s events immediately took on almost mythical proportions.
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Not far from the boat dock, on our side of the lake, was a lush, swampy island rimmed entirely by massive lily pads. It was so close in fact, that Grandfather didn’t even crank up the big motor to get us over to it. The five-minute troll to the shady side of the uninhabited island was like a trip to the ancient Amazon. The company, Grandfather, Grandmother, and my 80-year-old Great-Grandmother, was also
