For all you Master Naturalists out there, here is an easy question you ought to know: What living creature walks backward almost all the time, never looking where he (or she) is going? Answer at end of this column.
I caught three average-sized white bass in quick order yesterday evening. I looked at old Bolt, my Labrador, sleeping in the floor of the boat behind me.
“Boy I’m gonna have a good story about fishing this week,” I told him, thinking that in short order I would catch a tubful.
Bolt looked up at me and yawned and I could see in his face what he was thinking: “Don’t count your fish before they are hatched.” Bolt doesn’t say much, but when he does he is generally right, except he gets a lot of those old sayings mixed up. And as he lay back down and began to dream of mallards sailing over decoys on a north wind, I made another 300 or 400 casts and didn’t hook a thing.
That number of casts is an estimate of course. Outdoorsmen like to make estimates. Nothing is exact, out there in the woods and on the waters. Remember a month or so ago when I wrote about counting turkeys as they crossed the bottoms at my Panther Creek retreat. There were 51.
I was so happy to see that last turkey come out of the woods as they crossed over the clover field two or three at a time, together in single file, because 51 is a good number! Well some smartalec reader wrote that two or three of anything can’t walk across a field in single file!
That’s the way people are. If I had said I counted 50 turkeys, lots of people will think I just guessed at the actual number and didn’t really count them at all. In ducks, geese or turkeys, there never is a flock of exactly 50 and there are no flocks of exactly 100! If you say, “I saw a 100 mallards on my pond yesterday,” no one will believe you, but if you say, there was a 112 mallards on my pond, folks will accept that as an accurate count, and never question if you actual counted them.
Just like no one ever catches an exactly 5-pound bass, and if someone tells you that, he’s just guessing on the high side and he’s the kind of guy who gives fishermen a bad name. If he says his bass was 5 pounds and 3 ounces, he sounds much more believable. A 5-pound bass almost never weighs more than 5 pounds though. A fellow who boasts of catching a 5-pound bass almost always really caught one that weighed 4 pounds and so many ounces.
There are no bass anywhere that weigh exactly 5 pounds or exactly 6 pounds or exactly 10 pounds and if there were, you’d be best to add a couple or 3 ounces to the weight to sound accurate and believable! I am not sure how I got into this, but it has nothing to do with catching so few fish the other evening. Anyway, I have to tell the truth and I have fished on rare occasions when I caught just a few above nothing! It don’t happen often, and when it does I don’t generally write about it. But me and ol’ Bolt don’t care. We always have a good time and I don’t like to spend half the night filleting fish and Bolt won’t eat them raw. He likes them fried, with cornmeal.
I have to say that Bolt is not the most honest Labrador I have ever owned. I put my game camera up last week by one of my corn feeders. Got some good pictures of squirrels, raccoons, birds and deer. Then l was surprised to see Bolt there, with his head in that feeder. I never had a dog who ate raw, hard corn, but Bolt loves it, and he will not admit helping to drain that feeder. He denies he even knows where the feeder is! I think he is a good example of that old saying, “lying like a dog.”
There’s one thing you should do right now if you anticipate fishing a little this spring and summer… check out all your equipment. First of all, replace your line. Any kind of line weakens as it ages, and sometimes knicks develop in the last 10 or 12 feet. A weakened place in the line cost me a $10 lure last fall. I should point out that most of the time I do not buy lures because back years ago, I built up a supply of all kinds of lures by going to swap meets, and getting others in the mail from lure makers who hoped I would write about their product.
But a friend of mine in Arkansas told me of finding a top-water lure that was like nothing he had ever seen for bass. I couldn’t find it at the local Walmart sporting goods counter, so I went into Cabela’s up in Minnesota on the way to Canada and found some for $10. I bought two. Thanks to a hefty smallmouth in a strong current, and a weak place in 10-pound line, I now only have one!
I learned long ago from my Uncle Norten that on every fishing trip I should remove about 10 or 12 feet of line, and therefore eliminate any of the damage a previous trip may have caused. But like the slow-to-learn nit-wit that I have developed into since I was about 12, I just failed to do so that day in October and I lost my lure and a very large smallmouth, after landing several very small largemouths.
Replace your line and check the eyes on your rods. Any little knick or dent in the ceramic rings on your rod will cause you to have damaged line as it rubs against it. You might clean film off favorite lures with a toothbrush, and check hooks. Once a friend of mine fished a spinner-bait for hours before finding that the hook tip was broken off. And heed this advice: Use a little Sea-foam gas-additive or something like it in your outboard’s gas tank. It reduces the bad effect of today’s gasoline on outboards. And keep batteries recharged; hook up your trolling motor batteries to a charger every time you come in from a trip. They tell me that batteries weakened from hours of use go bad much earlier if they are recharged quickly.
The only creature that I know which spends more time going backwards than forwards is the crawdad, or crayfish if you lack an Ozark river-rat raising. Crawdads only go forward, it seems to me, when they come out from beneath a rock they have hidden beneath. And they have several legs but no feet whatsoever. That is a good thing because they way they live, if they did have feet they would get them hung up in crevices a lot! And it is much easier to pull your legs out of the mud if there are no feet on the end of them. God knew what he was doing when he made crawdads, except for that little problem of the eyes being on the wrong end!
If you would like to get a copy of our spring issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge outdoor magazine, or if you want to get a table at our March 25 swap meet, or if you’d like to join me at our next weekend workday at Panther Creek youth retreat, just call me at 417-777-5227 or write me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. Email is lightninridge@windstream.net. You can see some of my outdoor photos from time to time on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.