Why nobody will take Bet fishing (more than once)

February 6, 2009

Charlie put up on his website a few old photos he found around the house.  My favourite is one of a twenty-one year-old Bet, my bride, proudly holding a stringer of three fat largemouth bass.  That was the last time she fished for about twenty-five years.

It wasn’t until my pal Tony was bragging about his ability to hook a bass and he ran into Bet’s barbed wit that the subject came up:  “If you know so much about it, why don’t you ever fish?”

“Never mind,” I whispered.

Tony persisted:  “How about I set you up with a spinning rod – they’re really simple to use – and take you up onto Mosquito Lake this afternoon for an hour?”  Bet showed no real objection, so like an innocent Tony prepared the rod, the boat, and away they went.

I waited.  I knew what it would be like when they returned.  Yep.  There was Bet in the forward seat of  the Princecraft as they came in.  She was beaming.  Tony looked as if someone had stolen his favourite hat and stomped on it.  “So how did it go?”

“I got three nice ones,” Bet chirped.  “Tony didn’t get any.”  Bet was always a ruthless competitor when it came to fishing.  I winced.

Any one of the guys would have phrased the report as: “We kept three.”  This meant that between us we chose to keep only these three fish.  Others, the report implies, were released because they were too small, too large, or were lost.  We even learned to call the ones that got away “remote releases” to remove the sting of failure.

Tony groaned, “Does she ever miss a fish?”

“No,” I assured him.  “Bet’s a Leo, and I guess that means she has claws like a lion.  If a fish even nibbles at a bait on Bet’s line, it’s as good as dead.  She never fails to hook a fish.”

Tony and I and the other guys, of course, miss all kinds of bass.  It’s a running joke reporting that one or the other of us caught a largemouth on the fifth strike, third worm, or some such.  We even credit each other with assists.  You get an assist for first missing the fish, and then watching while your partner hooks and lands it.

This sort of sophistry is fun.  Putting a positive spin on our ineptitude is a big part of the bonding of fishing partners.  But not with Bet.  “She was at the front of the boat, right?”

“No, I was in the bow, running the trolling motor,  but she still made casts all around me, sometimes even in front of the boat, before I could get my bait into the spots,” Tony complained.

“I gather she didn’t have any trouble switching from bait casting to a spinning rod?”  On the dock before departure Tony had made a big deal of teaching Bet how to use a “proper” fishing rod.  Now he just glared at me.

“She didn’t leave a square foot of lily pads or a stump for me to fish, and I was in front of her, the whole time!”

“Now do you see why Bet doesn’t fish much?”  I asked.

“Yep.”

It was Labour Day, 1974.  Over the summer in an old canoe on Opinicon Lake I had recorded data on every bass I caught.  My goal was to hit the century mark before summer holidays ended.  That morning I had counted up ninety-eight fish.  All I needed were two more to reach my goal.  We dropped the canoe in at Chaffey’s and worked our way out the shoreline of Opinicon.

Bet soon retired her paddle and worked steadily with her spin-cast rig.  The artificial worm on a weedless hook slid easily under the overhanging trees as I methodically positioned the canoe for the best angle.  I hardly ever saw an opening to cast.  I almost hoped that maybe she would get a line tangle, or even hang up in a tree for a few minutes and give me a chance, but no:  every cast was either perfectly placed, or short of the mark and quickly retrieved.

Then in the space of six casts she landed three bass for a total weight of ten pounds.  Bet was jubilant at her success.  They were very nice fish, and she had handled them well.

But I needed two fish to meet my quota, and she wouldn’t stop casting.  What’s more, she ridiculed the one small bass I reeled in.  ‘Are you going to keep that poor little thing?  Why, it can’t be more than twelve or thirteen inches!’

As I recall my temper frayed sufficiently that I decided to transport my lovely, talented wife and her bass back to the dock before the fish grew stale.  Then I took the picture of this beautiful young woman and the fish which should have been mine.  That was the last fishing trip.

Bet went on to endure many summers in a leaky boat, my numerous half-completed do-it-yourself projects, and all of my dietary quirks.  She raised our son well, has had a fine career and put up with a series of neurotic spaniels.

After thirty-seven years I can’t imagine life without her, but we’re both smart enough not to try fishing together.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Bet.

bet-and-bass

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Bass Derby – The way it used to be

January 29, 2009

It was August 5th, 1975.  My fishing partner of the day was Dr. Don Mintz, a Queen’s medical student who was at the clinic in Newboro for the summer.  Though by 1975 I no longer needed to rent one of his canoes, having inherited one from my uncle, I still liked to launch my fishing trips from Don Warren’s lawn because he had lots of advice on how to fish Opinicon Lake, and he let me pick frogs in his garden  if I wanted them.

This day we paddled the three miles up to Deadlock Bay.  It turned out to be one of those perfect mid-summer days when the fish simply don’t bite.  We explored the beaver dam, then crossed it and made our way up the winding creek to the foot of Hart Lake.  A shore leave involved a couple of casts into the upper lake after a climb up the trail, but the prospects of a bass for lunch seemed no better up there than down below, so we headed back out to the large mats of floating yellow algae for which the Deadlock is famous.

They weren’t producing that day, though.  We worked down the shoreline with a the gentle breeze, and surely enough, a large bass sheltering beside a flat rock took my artificial worm and surrendered to the net after a vigorous tussle among the weeds and stumps of the bay.  It wasn’t until the fish lay panting in the bottom of my canoe that I realized I had a problem on my hands.  This fish was big.  Trophy big.  Bass contest  big.  How would I preserve the thing for mounting when I was a half hour of hard paddling from the dock?

Like an idiot I paddled up to guide Lennie Pyne, who was trying hard to get fish for his own clients on this slow day.  I realized years later what a breach of etiquette this had been, but Lennie took it all in stride. “Keep it alive as long as you can, and be careful not to break or split the fins,” he suggested.  “Empty your cooler.  It looks as though it will just fit.  Fill it with water and any ice you have, and that should keep it until you get to a weigh-in station.  It’s a very nice fish, not just because of its size, but because it’s well proportioned and in good condition.  You should get it mounted.”

Dr. Mintz had no objection to cutting the expedition short.  We hurriedly paddled back to Warren’s launch and showed Don the fish.  He looked at the magnificent bass, didn’t notice the tail of a large perch protruding from its gullet, and commented, “It looks a little dry.  Maybe we should give it a drink.”  He picked up the nozzle of his garden hose and shoved it down the bass’s throat, then turned on the water.  As the fish’s abdomen distended he eased the water off.  A surprising amount of the torrent stayed in when Don set the fish down on the lawn.  “That’s an old guiding trick.  Judges will catch lead sinkers every time, though I know of one guy who tried to put a chunk of pig iron into a fish once.  There’s not much they can do with water, though, and you have to put the fluids back that the fish has lost since its capture.”

Off we went with our now-heavier bass to Brown’s Store.  Chuck Brown was most accommodating.  The dripping fish went onto a large piece of craft paper and right onto his polished brass scales.  “Five pounds, eight ounces, and 20 ¼” in length.  A fine bass.”  He wrote the weight on a note, signed it, and suggested we take the fish to Westport to Gary Murphy’s Barber Shop, as he was hosting the only local big bass contest this summer.  Chuck didn’t seem to mind the drippings from my fish on his counter.  “It wipes off,”  he grinned.

‘”Fetch” Murphy remembered me from my time as his pre-teen neighbour on Church Street.  The fish weighed five pounds by his scale, but he said it looked pretty dried out and he would accept Chuck’s weight as the official rating.  He suggested I freeze the fish and take it to Dawson Girdwood in Perth if I wanted a nice job done on the mounting, so a couple of weeks later I did just that.

Don and Shelley moved to Vancouver soon after our fishing trip and he set up an ear, nose and throat practice.  A couple of months passed and out of the blue I received a letter from Miss Claire Donnelly informing me that my entry was “the largest mouth bass caught that summer in the Westport area,” and the $25. cheque enclosed was first prize in the contest.

I had won money in a bass derby!

As I recall the letter went on to name Joe Babcock the winner of the smallmouth contest with a six-pound entry.

Along about February Dawson Girdwood called me to pick up the mounted bass.  It cost four times my winnings, but the largemouth still decorates the wall in my study.  There have been many bigger fish since, but my first bass over five pounds was a real milestone.

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