‘The one that got away’

The two 2023 images I can’t forget are of big smallmouth bass leaping to freedom.

In three days of late-July fishing on the drought-stricken Mississippi River in Minnesota, my son Fred Love of Ames and I caught 110 brown bass – mostly strong, fat, hyper-aggressive fish in the 16-to19-inch range. Though we photographed many of them, the one that sticks in my mind never got its picture taken.

Fred hooked it on a crankbait, and the battle seemed routinely savage until the fish leapt from the water to an amazing height of 5 feet, attaining enough slack line to spit the lure.

My crest fell, as did Fred’s, I imagine. We will never know its length or weight, but it was of a much higher order of magnitude than we are accustomed to catching. It would certainly have been “the fish of the trip,” maybe the fish of a lifetime.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told Fred. “You already had 95 percent of the fun that fish had to give. You hooked it. You fought it. You got to see it. You’re not in a tournament, and you sure as hell were not going to eat it.

“It just released itself, saving you the trouble.”

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Those words came back to haunt me on Sept. 25 as I cast for smallmouth bass on the Wapsipinicon – an activity I have engaged in at least 1,000 times in the past 60 years.

As I approached my favorite hole, I stopped and tied on a Heddon Torpedo, a topwater lure with a propeller in front of the rear treble hook.

On the first cast, a big smallmouth bass rose to hit it the instant it plopped on the surface of the river. The fish hooked itself and fought stubbornly until it finally acquiesced to my touch. After photographing and releasing it, I thought to myself, “Well, first cast and my day has been made.”

My second cast landed with a plop in the same spot, and an even bigger bolt of lightning struck.

I set the hooks into a heavy fish that fought hard to stay out of sight.

“Probably a big northern,” I thought. “Smallmouth don’t get this heavy around here.”

Then it jumped out of the water, revealing itself to be the largest smallmouth bass I’d ever had on the end of my line – a fish of proportions I had once thought mythical.

The bass, in fast water at the edge of a sandbar drop-off, swam swiftly downstream against the resistance of my flexed rod and the drag on my spinning reel.

Eventually I regained most of my line and led the fish to the edge of the sandbar on which I stood. As its head emerged from the water, I lifted the fish toward captivity, never thinking its weight would increase dramatically as it lost the buoyancy of the water. My 10-pound braided line broke at the knot, and the fish of a lifetime sank back into the river, the lure still snared in its lip the last to disappear.

It was operator error. The long-awaited moment of truth had arrived and found me wanting.

One cast after catching a fish that had made my day, I lost another that ruined it.

Rather than quit, as I was tempted to do, I tied on another lure (taking special care with the knot) and resumed fishing. Momentarily the fish of a lifetime, in an effort to dislodge the annoying lure, leapt completely out of the water three times in rapid succession, ensuring that its image would forever be burnt into my memory.

Yes, I ‘d had the fun of hooking and fighting it and yes, I’d gotten to see it, perhaps excessively. But I knew, as my son did in July, that that was a prize of little consolation.