116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Knocked out by smallmouth bass
Wild Side column: Great days on the ‘bony’ and ‘skinny’ Mississippi River
LITTLE FALLS, Minn, — After discarding “ecstatic” and “euphoric,” I settled on “giddy “ to describe how I felt and acted after catching my second 19-inch smallmouth bass in a three-cast sequence.
My fishing buddy (and son) Fred Love of Ames, observing my sweat-streaked face and adrenaline-slurred words, said “punchdrunk” was more apt, and he was right. I may have won both rounds, but I took a beating from those hefty, tireless, muscular and athletic bass.
Fishing during the last, hottest week of July, we caught 115 big-shouldered, high-energy bass in two-and-a-half days. They struck savagely, and even at the end of every protracted battle, they flopped, splashed and skittered over the landing net, loathe to be caught..
In the transparent water of the Mississippi River, we could clearly see all their capture-resistance moves from head shakes, dives and dogged burrows to drag-screeching, knot-testing runs, 180-degree turns and breathtaking leaps.
You quickly realize they have the initiative; that they are acting and you are reacting; that with standard spinning tackle you cannot “horse” them toward the boat; but that, if your tackle holds and you can parry their thrusts, you can eventually lead them to the net.
We launched at Crow Wing State Park, just 103 miles downstream from the great river’s Lake Itasca source, in water as fishy-looking as any I’ve seen. Brisk current at the riffles. Rock everywhere — along both banks and covering much of the bed, frequently protruding from the river as isolated boulders and extensive rock gardens.
The free-flowing Mississippi, unhindered by Army engineers, winds through pine and hardwood forests, splits around numerous islands, gurgles over and around shoreline and midstream rock and teems with gamefish dominated by lure-innocent smallmouth bass.
In the words of our guide, Torin Mann of Little Falls, it is both “skinny” (meaning shallow) and “bony” (meaning rocky) — too bony and skinny for safe navigation during the prevailing extreme drought by all but shallow-draft motorless vessels like canoes, kayaks and Torin’s western drift boat; so bony and skinny that we saw only two other boats that may have contained anglers in our 20 hours on the river.
Powered exclusively by the current and the muscles of our guide, the drift boat has prows fore and aft so it looks the same coming or going and always is pointed in the right direction. Torin, a Minnesotan of Norwegian heritage and a likely descendant of Vikings, is genetically disposed to all-day oaring of boats.
The current provided much of the downstream motive force, but Torin frequently crisscrossed the 200-yard-wide river to put us in casting range of shoreline rock, outside weed edges, downstream island tips and plunge pools below riffles.
From Fred’s first cast, which netted a brawling smallmouth, we knew the trip would be special, and on the way home we talked about what made it so.
Was it the pristine valley with its sparkling clear water so foreign to Corn Belt anglers? Was it having a world-class fishery all to ourselves? Was it our patient, knowledgeable, tireless and affable guide and his quiet, comfortable drift boat?
All of the above, certainly, but top billing goes to the apparently omnipresent eager-biting, hard-fighting smallmouth bass.
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