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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
A day of bliss on the Wapsi
Wild Side column: The weather and the fishing were near perfect over the holiday weekend
The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
With euphoria getting harder to come by these days, the buzz I caught on Good Friday was therapeutic.
I had been waiting all spring for just such a day — overcast, 60 degrees, high humidity, no wind — to visit my favorite spring hole for pre-spawn smallmouth bass.
It was kind of hard to get there — 418 steps, up hill and down, through the woods on a narrow trail lined with rotting wood and spring ephemeral wildflowers — and I hadn’t wanted to expend the effort until conditions were favorable.
Upon first sight of the target area, my default mental outlook, wishing and hoping, skyrocketed to great expectations. The hole hadn’t changed since my last visit a year earlier. Clear, shallow water trickled toward the darker depths of a sandbar drop-off, along which smallmouth staged each spring before spawning.
I waded ankle-deep to the edge of the drop-off and tossed my plastic-minnow-tipped jig into the dark water, where a bass caught it on the drop like a center fielder camped under a lazy fly ball. One cast, one bass.
Eighteen casts later I was 19 for 19.
It was like they didn’t care if they got caught. No, it was more like they wanted to get caught, couldn’t wait to get caught. No amount of sharp-hooked lures passing among them, no amount of water frothed by hooked fishes’ resistance could deter them from biting.
My earlier stealth dissolved into slaphappy nonchalance.
I’d long since given up trying to understand why they congregate each spring at this particular, more or less, nondescript spot. It was enough to know that they do.
But even bliss, as rare and pleasurable as it may be, can get a little monotonous. It’s not like you’ve earned it by making a difficult cast to a specific spot that your extensive experience tells you may hold a nice fish. It’s more like lobbing your lure into a barrel of fish who shove each other out of the way to get at it.
And so, after I’d caught my 38th bass on my 44th cast, I decided to get out of there with my buzz intact.
Still grinning and glowing with well-being, I walked through the back door and told my wife she wouldn’t believe how special my afternoon was.
Before I could even get my phone/camera out of my pocket, she said: “This is not going to be another fish story, is it?” Then, with a dismissive wave, she flicked me off like the Geico commercial mom who couldn’t wait to be rid of the squealing pig who went “wee wee wee” all the way home.
On Good Saturday I revisited the hole with my friend, fly fisherman Mike Jacobs of Monticello, and the bass were only slightly less heedless. There were lulls in which you might go three casts between bites.
We couldn’t make them leave or quit biting, and neither could the girthy 30-plus-inch northern pike Mike eventually landed after a lengthy battle — an apex predator whose toothy maw should have evoked terror in any bass within reach.
But many of them had swum a long way to get there, and they weren’t leaving until the party was over — certainly not because of the threat of predation nor because some of them were getting yanked around on the end of a string.
Back home that afternoon, I kept my phone in my pocket and my bliss to myself and husbanded it through the following days. Even now, as I write this on Wednesday, I can still feel little remnant tingles.
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