A bad day fishing is time well spent

Sometimes, when I am shivering in a cold river waiting for a fish to bite, I wonder if I should not be doing something else.

Toward the end of a cool, gray, windy afternoon, that thought crossed my mind Tuesday as I stood in the Wapsipinicon, slowly losing feeling in my fingers and toes, reviewing the faulty thought process by which I had arrived.

I had tried to talk myself out of going. But my two strongest arguments – that I'll be miserable and the fish won't bite – were no match for the rapidly oncoming end of the open water fishing season.

With the northern hemisphere tilting away from the sun, which will set about two minutes per day earlier until the winter solstice, you simply can't wait for pleasant conditions, which may never materialize, I told myself.

Plus, I reasoned, whatever misery might ensue would have to be endured no longer than the official 6:17 p.m. setting of the sun, at which time I could honorably quit.

On Tuesday, however, sunset was an abstract concept. There was no sun – only uniformly gunmetal sky and water, lit occasionally by a floating yellow leaf torn by an audible wind from its lonely mooring on the dark, bare tree branches overhanging the Wapsi.

Her transparent waters, so beautiful just a week earlier when they reflected blue skies and brilliant Indian summer hues, now appeared as opaque as the mud bank at my back.

Besides chilling my ears and fingers, the 18 mph north wind frequently blew my casts off course, and my succession of proven lures met resistance only when they lodged themselves in the crevices of river bottom rocks, forcing me to wade through my target waters to free them.

About an hour into my ordeal, having tired of laboriously freeing lures that the fish obviously hated anyway, I decided to just pull on the line until it broke, at which point I would try one more different lure or maybe just go home.

But the lure, a Rapala floating minnow, somehow popped free, and when it did a formerly indifferent fish lunged for it.

It was a 10-inch smallmouth bass – too little for thrills but big enough for encouragement.

With renewed confidence, I ratcheted up my concentration for the stretch drive, during which I caught two more bass, a 15-incher and a 17-incher.

Though their barred brown complexion added no color to a monochrome day, their spirited resistance infused me with a glow of warmth and well being reminiscent of a double shot of Templeton rye,