Bass in Florida are like Led Zeppelin on the radio: Always on somewhere. I’ve said that before* (in one of my infrequent posts on Buster Wants to Fish.) But I am saying it again because the words and the actions behind them are repeatable. Sometimes I wonder if it seems like a broken record with me, and maybe it does, but we all need sporting traditions. One of my main riffs goes like this: Fly down, rent car, criss-cross the State on back roads and wait for the rain to break. Drive past a body of water, look for access, cast. The coasts and the Keys are incongruous with the interior, the land of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Marjory Kinnan Rawlings. All the way up to Shingle Creek…
Posts tagged “largemouth bass”
The fly line entangled in some shoreline debris and I looked down to yank it free, and at that moment a green shape chose to cut through the water to my popper. I had no tension on the line so I watched its fat profile surge and descend on the popper, create a brief interlude of chaos and disappear. The excessively corpulent type of largemouth, the kind that would give FLW types arrhythmia, has eluded me for 12 years, ever since a memorable encounter on a small lake in Michigan. Since then I’ve had to settle for the small to decent to merely large. The near misses are haunting. In the end it gets added to the personal rolodex of frustration, along with the…
Tagged: largemouth bass
…could be because something’s bogging it down.
Tagged: Fly Fishing, largemouth bass, poppers
When there is no time afforded you have to steal some. Five casts. Fifty casts. Five hundred. Whatever it takes to make something out of another thing that you don’t rightfully have. One jump should suffice to bend it back in your favor.
Tagged: largemouth bass, stealing
The whole thing started with the least of expectations. I had a rod and some time to kill due to a delayed appointment. I made some casts. I caught nothing. I drove to the appointment. Delayed again, for another hour. I google mapped. I found nearby water. I tried a new fly. On my first cast I caught a mayan cichlid. Sweet. Then I saw a dark swirling shape hanging out near a submerged drain pipe. I made a cast. A largemouth bass with a middling amount of heft liked my offering. OK, cool. I released the bass. Then I saw two bulbous fish cruising the shoreline at a fast clip. I made a lead cast. One charged like a mofo. It took off…
This ain’t no tournament and I ain’t got no sponsors to placate. If you’re willing to take on the surface it’s all well and good.
Tagged: jumping, largemouth bass, poppers
On a back road between New Smyrna and Sanford I pulled off to the side in front of a goat farm. A pond sat in the front pasture between the house and the roadside fence. I’d always heard of people asking farmers for permission and it looked fishy and I wanted to try it. The crushed rock and sand driveway under my feet made loud sounds as I walked to the house, causing the nanny goats and kids to look up from their grazing and I could feel them staring at me behind my back. No one answered when I knocked on the door–I couldn’t find a doorbell button–and I quickened my step going back to the car. I closed the driver-side door against…
Tagged: CDB, largemouth bass
I Google Earthed the locale near my hotel. Water. Accessible water. Sometimes the satellites do not present the full picture. I took to Beta testing some bad-ass prototypes from WT. Prognosis? They cast well and swim well. Fish? What do you want? It’s Florida in July; 95 degrees in the freaking gloaming. Due time for paydirt. Field testing in the name of science builds an appetite. This is what you call a dynamic cuban sandwich. On to the hotel bar to cleanse the palate and hear the lounge act.
Tagged: cuban sandwiches, largemouth bass
Thank you for subscribing to two of the deadly sins, avarice and gluttony. Thank you for trying to eat the object making raucous splashes that doesn’t really look like food, just in case. Thank you for jumping.
Tagged: largemouth bass
The first thing you do is drive west. Past all the planned communities and through the endless horizon of cane fields, some thick with smoke from controlled burn, and make your way to the big lake. Then drive onto and over the levee and the single lane bridge and meet buddy Don at the launch ramp. Don is a tournament bass fisherman. He’s pre-fishing and you’re going along for the ride, skating at 60 on the pad. Don can do some things with a baitcaster in his hand. He’s working the bass in shallow, going off the grid and you’re trying to cast your fly rod in and around the tall grass and strip your so-called weedless through the dense vegetation. The bass key…
