"Bob La Londe" wrote in message
...
"Ronnie" wrote in message

Glad to hear it. My first of 07 wasn't so sterling. If you are looking for
an adventure in fishing with huge bags and lots of exciting catches stop
reading now.

snip
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Boy, you were right, Bob. If I wanted a story with fish in it, I should have
kept on clicking.

Your story has a familiar ring to it, though. I've blanked in tournaments
more times than I care to remember. In fact, I probably forget them on
purpose.

I do remember one. It was a night tournament near Marion, Arkansas. Bear
Creek Lake. Little fruit jar tournament. Bubba and I didn't get a single tap
on our lures from 8 PM to 7 AM. I have trouble sleeping the night before a
tournament, so when we left the ramp at 8 AM, I hadn't really slept for
about 48 hours, and I was starting to feel a little tired.

However, as we drove back to Memphis (it was a two hour drive from Bear
Creek to our homes in east Shelby County), our distaste at not catching fish
overwhelmed our need to catch some Z's. We decided to go fishing.

We drove through Memphis and down into Mississippi, ending up at Arkabutla
dam. Folks were flocking to the banks, and as we watched, some of them were
hooking and keeping large, white fish. From our vantage point in the parking
lot above the spillway, we could see they were buffalo drum, which were
running upstream in their spring spawning migration. The dam had them
stacked up thick in the race, where white water roared out from the turbines
and tumbled down a boulder-lined channel to the old river bed below.

Now, Charles Summers is something of a local legend in middle Tennessee
when it comes to drum fishing, and he can affirm that drum like Rat'L Traps.
Bubba and I tied a couple of chrome/blue back ones on our rods, locked up
the truck, and clambered down the rocks to the river. Our first casts
revealed to us that the rushing, foamy water was only a foot or two deep.
Furthermore, the bottom was festooned with the accumulation of years of meat
fishermen's broken-off lines, which we snagged and had to pull off
frequently.

Some of those Mississippi fishermen use cheap, dime store monofilament and
old spark plugs as weights. They tie a drop-shot rig and the sparkplug
weight at the end of their line catches in a rock crevice. Then, they wait
until a drum snatches their bait that's dangling a few feet up the line in
the current. When that happens, the angler rears back, sets the hook, snaps
the line (below the hook, they hope) and reels in the fish. Consequently,
there's a lot of junk in the water. Almost no one throws crankbaits, for
obvious reasons.

But, there we were, and every other cast of our Rat'L Trap would be rewarded
with a drum, so we were in hawg heaven, reaffirming ourselves as expert
fishermen (remember, our egos had taken a beating the previous night), and
getting our lines stretched with strong fish in swift current. The average
size of the drum we were catching was three pounds.

After releasing a half dozen of them, we grew aware that the pitiful gaze of
this pathetic young mother of two children locked on us every time we
unhooked a fish. Her boy, about six years old, had a little Snoopy rod and
reel, with which he was flinging a little bobber and hook as far as he could
out into the river -- about ten feet, maximum. The current immediately swept
it back to the shore, so he wasn't having much luck in the four-inch deep
water that he was able to reach. The mother's empty 5-gallon bucket was
beside her, and when Bubba waved a 5-pound drum in its general direction and
contorted his face into an expression that was intended to mean, "would you
like this nice, fat fish?" she quickly nodded and smiled thankfully. We
filled up the bucket in about ten minutes. I think she was happy. I don't
know if the boy was too thrilled, because as soon as the bucket was full,
his fishing time was up. The mom grabbed kids, rod, and bucket and, with a
"gracias," climbed up the bank and out of sight.

Our act of kindness (Was it? We were just catching fish, and releasing them
to her bucket seemed better than releasing them back into the river, where
the dam denied their breeding imperative) had attracted attention. No sooner
had the first little mother cleared out when another took her place. She,
like the first woman, spoke no English. Neither Bubba nor I spoke Spanish
for the first, or Thai for the second, but Bubba had the "do you want fish"
down pat by that time, and that she understood. She nodded. We fished. Ten
minutes later, I could read here expression. "I wish I'd brought five
buckets... I could be rich!" Having but one, when it could hold no more fish
she picked it up without a word to us, jabbered at her kids, and lugging the
forty pound bucket of drum, they made their exit, too.

Having satisfied ourselves that fish once again should fear us, and also
finally breaking off our lures about that time, we, too, decided to head
out. Looking up, we saw that our part of the bank had become crowded in the
half hour since we arrived. Our path took us up past a line of women, kids
in tow, buckets in hand, glaring accusingly at us as we stumbled back up the
rip-rap to our truck.

Joe