Fishing advice: ‘Keep your line in the water’

This column is writing itself. It will be done in little more than the time it takes to finish reading it.

I almost hate to get paid for typing it in since doing so required little thought, effort or creativity. I’m just transcribing recollections of a sparkling autumn day on a hyper-clear river whose fish had taken the day off.

It’s about how good things can happen when you least expect it. Its lesson: Keep your line in the water.

At 9:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, Mike Jacobs of Monticello, Ray Thys of Marion and I launched kick boats on the Maquoketa River below the Lake Delhi dam. An hour later, at the end of an extremely fishy looking stretch of river, none of us had caught a fish.

We did not succumb to the temptation to merely go through the motions. We tried different lures and presentations, and finally caught a few fish, none worthy of a photo.

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At noon, our kick boats grounded in a shallow eddy, we lingered over lunch, positing explanations for the fishes’ indifference to our lures, our usual impatience to resume fishing lacking.

After lunch more desultory fishing ensued. Finally, four hours into our float, Ray and I had occasion to remove our cellphone cameras from our pockets, when we noticed Mike’s fly rod arced toward the water, bent nearly double by an as yet unseen submarine force.

All the day’s drama was compressed into the next three and a half minutes as the fish tested Mike’s skill, finesse and patience.

Steady pressure finally overcame the fish’s reluctance to leave the river bottom. It leapt once and again, revealing its lunkerness.

Much can go wrong when a large, angry smallmouth bass goes airborne with nothing but a small barbless hook and a light leader between it and freedom.

Ray and I held our breath and clicked our phone camera shutters as Mike tried to coax her to hand.

Complicating that task, his strike indicator had become lodged in the top eyelet of his fly rod. The combination of a 9-foot rod and a 7 1/2-foot leader kept the bass well out of his reach. His only option was to hand-line the leader, a risky maneuver that eliminated the shock-absorbing flex of his fly rod.

Ray and I expelled our held breath as the big bass glided into Mike’s hand, the hook falling from her mouth with the release of tension on the line. She measured 20 inches — the ninth smallmouth of 20 or more inches Mike has caught in Eastern Iowa’s interior rivers.

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I was with him 10 years ago when he caught his eighth. For an angler who has since caught thousands of smallmouth, a decade between 20 inchers underscores the specialness of such a fish.

Our tingling nerves, still buzzing two hours later at the end of our float, underscored the specialness of the day.