Female bass are gullible

I stopped the boat above the shoal and walked around the swift water on gravel which crunched beneath my feet. Wading out into the cool current, I had my eye on the deepening pool just below the shoal, where the water slowed. I cast the top-water minnow across the pool, and began jerking it out into the dark water. I had a feeling there might be a three- or four-pound smallmouth in that spot. If I had run my canoe through it he might have spooked, but as quietly as I had moved into place, he couldn’t have suspected a thing.

I shouldn’t refer to the fish as a “he”. If it was a nice hefty smallmouth, it would likely be a “she”. Males seldom get really fat and hefty. I guess that is because during the spawning season the males have to do all the worrying and working and watching over the nest and the eggs and the hatching young. Us fathers can identify with that… responsibility. As a sign of the stress he is under, the male smallmouth usually will just go crazy when the young fish, sometimes a few thousand or so of them from one nest, get up to a half-inch or so in length. At that point he will often slash through them a time or two and eat a bunch of them. That tells them they are on their own, no longer being guarded and protected by the paternal instinct he started out with.

The whole thing sounds barbaric to us humans, but then, we never had to worry about a few thousand kids at a time. The female bass have little to worry about. They just lay the eggs and take off. They eat voraciously after the eggs are deposited and get fat.

That’s something that happens with human females from time to time, but not always. You’ve seen it, I’m sure… a young couple gets married, and two or three youngsters later, there’s the young wife getting older, eating and watching TV and getting fat while the male is out there working hard and all stressed out and getting thinner by the year trying to provide for the family.

I say this knowing that if any women were to read this column they would be objecting to it all in a quite voracious manner. But this is an outdoor column and it is only read by men. Women seldom read outdoor columns… they read Ann Landers and Heloise.

Anyway, there was a nice female bass there in the swirling pool beneath the shoal, just about as mad as any lady who has read this far, and she absolutely engulfed that lure. I had six-pound line on a spinning outfit, and her sudden strike pulled a couple of feet of line off the spool against the lightly-set drag. I thought right then she was a good three pounds, a veteran old seasoned momma smallmouth which had spent most of her life loafing and eating crawdads. And in the current of an Ozark river stream, on light tackle, you can’t always tell the size of the bass in the fight, it just depends on the type of fight in the bass. This one wasn’t a lunker. She wound up being about two and a quarter pounds, and I turned her loose without even taking a picture. There were two or three more to be caught right there, none of them as big as she was. In fact some of them were a fairly pale in color and skinny… likely males highly stressed at the conclusion of the mating season.

I caught a lot of smallmouth that afternoon. None of them exceeded two and a half pounds but several were better than two pounds. And later in the day, casting a spinner bait with my open-face bass-casting reel equipped with twelve-pound line, I hooked a good four- pound largemouth around a brushpile downstream in the depths of a quieter hole of water. She was a dandy, with a mouth as wide as her body and that’s about all I had better say about that. I am not trying to insinuate anything because male lineside bass have mouths nearly as big as a female’s. Not quite, but almost.

Now just in case there are some new readers out there who are outdoor ladies, this is all written in jest. I didn’t have to say that 10 years ago, but nowadays I get hostile letters on occasion from women who are new readers and don’t have a sense of humor. Of the newspapers which print this column more than half of them have lady publishers or editors. That’s why I want to be sure everyone knows I’m not serious about this. Actually though, I CAN tell the difference between a male bass and a female bass when I release them. When I return a male bass back to the water, he swims away in a subdued gracious manner. When I release a female bass, she splashes water all over me, and leaves a muddy cloud in her wake. And that’s the honest truth, without one bit of masculiminism in it.

There is nothing like getting off away from everyone and fishing for bass on an Ozark stream in the hot summer time. I fish the hard-to-get-to, away-from-the-crowd places where canoe businesses do not operate. It is a natural peaceful setting with no motors, no sounds but the singing of birds and the splashing of fish and beavers and an occasional diving kingfisher. And of course there’s the sound of my paddle in the water, and swift water over a shoal. It is heaven on earth, when you find a place that men haven’t ruined yet with too much progress. And yes, I fish the lakes in a bass boat, too. But when it comes to quality fishing, there is no comparison. Give me the river and a big fat female smallmouth… er uh I mean a nice lady smallmouth of perfect proportion.

Look for the summer issue of my magazine, The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal on newsstands at Walmart or Orsheln stores or any of a number of the larger grocery stores. It surprises me how many of our readers have not seen this magazine, filled with great outdoor stories, and with beautiful color photos and art throughout. This is the 60th issue we have put out in the past 15 years. You may call our office to get one by mail – 417/777-5227. Our address is Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613.

Write to me at that address or e-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.