Sunday, March 15, 2009
Recalling a splendid day on the water
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
Recent columns
"OK, now, watch your poles."
Normally, this kind of sentence would make me cringe.
After all, I'm the guy who recently had a proud dad moment when one of his 7-year-old daughters explained to someone, "When they have a reel, they're a rod. When they don't have a reel, they're a pole."
But in this case I wasn't focused on semantics.
I was focused on the mass of crescent shaped figures on the boat's sonar unit, knowing the rigs we were trolling were about to enter the impact zone.
If Frank Skillman was going to tell me to watch my pole, I was darn well going to watch my pole.
And boom.
It started bouncing.
This was the beginning of what was going to be one of those rare, magical days.
The kind where you go into it hoping for just a little something, but find a lot of something.
The kind where you spend more time fighting fish than fishing for fish.
The kind where it gets so easy, you actually try another approach, just for the heck of it.
And it almost hadn't happened.
A day earlier Frank had called me from the lake.
"It's terrible," he said.
We had plans to connect the next morning, and now we were getting ready to punt those plans.
Frank usually fishes every day, a deserved luxury for a guy who spent a lot of years working hard to earn his retirement in a modest house on the shore of Smith Mountain Lake.
But high winds and family obligations had kept him off the water all week. When he finally got back out, he was stymied.
Had it just been me set to fish with Frank, the tournament director for the Smith Mountain Striper Club, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But my friend Pat Baker was planning to come up for the day from Abingdon.
An attorney who dabbles in outdoor writing, Pat was working on a piece on Roanoke-area fishing for the Virginia Sportsman.
Last summer, Pat had guided me to a great day of smallmouth fishing on the Levisa River in Grundy and I wanted to return the favor. Fortunately, Frank had generously offered to help.
I called Pat and told him we'd have to reschedule.
"The fishing is bad," I said. "Plus the weather looks a little iffy, too."
No problem, he said.
Ten minutes later my phone rang. It was Frank.
"I found the fish," he said.
Fortunately they were still there at the mouth of the little cove the next morning.
Usually, Frank likes to hit fish like this with jigging spoons. But that technique hadn't been working well, so we were trolling umbrella rigs outfitted with 5-inch-long shad.
Trolling umbrella rigs, actually a popular summer technique, isn't sexy. But if it works, so what?
And even through Frank had urged our vigilance as we slowly cruised over the school, there was no assurance we would actually catch them.
In fact, having an outdoor writer in a boat is often insurance that you won't catch them.
The question was, would two outdoor writers double the bad luck? Or would we cancel each other out?
The bouncing rods answered that question.
And kept answering it.
On just about every pass through the spot, we'd hook at least one fish, and often two. The fast action allowed us the luxury of savoring the action and the conversation, and not feeling the need to rush back through the hot spot.
Most fell within the protected slot, so they quickly went back into the water. A couple of short stripers went into the fish box. The biggest was a fat 32-incher that was pushing 15 pounds.
How many did we catch? We lost count, a sure sign that it's been an extraordinarily good day.
Another sign?
We eventually reeled in the trolling rigs and started jigging.
And when that didn't work, we didn't really care.
Instead of going back to trolling, we packed up the gear and enjoyed a casual boat ride back to the dock.
We'd had enough fishing, but we still weren't in a big hurry for the day to end.
Days like that come around only so often.
