After almost forty years of trying, I guess I will give up. I am never going to catch a 10-pound bass. Yes, I came close, 39 years ago, in early March of 1971. I darn near done it! It goes back to my boyhood of course, when Uncle Norten would stop by our home with those huge bass in ice chests that had to be doubled up just to get them in there.
He’d catch them on the big lakes where he guided city fishermen, lakes with exotic names like Bull Shoals and Tablerock and Greers Ferry. By the time I was fifteen years old, he had caught five different bass over 10 pounds from those three Ozark lakes. One weighed over 11 pounds, and he was mentioned in one of those national outdoor magazines I was constantly reading.
In 1970 I graduated from the University of Missouri and landed a job as the Outdoor Editor for Arkansas’ largest newspaper in Little Rock, the Arkansas Democrat. I had always wanted to be a game warden someday, so I had majored in wildlife management, and had very little journalism experience.
But at M.U. I had been writing a weekly column in the Columbia Missourian. The newspaper had never had an outdoor writer, and the job didn’t pay much. I always figured that was the reason they would hire a 21-year-old kid with nothing more than a wooden johnboat and a dozen hand-me-down fishing lures, to write about the outdoors. Gloria Jean and I moved to a little place way out in the country north of Little Rock, and I got a charge account at Sears Roebuck so I could buy some clothes. They said you couldn’t come to work in tennis shoes and old blue jeans until you had become an accomplished journalist!
To write about fishing, you have to get a good boat, and the Chrysler Marine Division sent the Democrat a brand new 35-horsepower electric-start motor, which they gave to me. Up in the north central part of the state, a lanky fellow who wore a cowboy hat and fished Bull Shoals a lot, had started making fiberglass lake boats, and the newspaper said he might give me one to go with the motor, so I could fish the lakes with the same propensity with which I was fishing Crooked Creek and Kings River out of that old wooden johnboat.
The guy’s name was one to remember, Forrest Wood. I always thought a boat-maker ought to have a name like Lake, or River, or something, but Forrest Wood was his name, no joke. He was new in the business, but one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. I liked him the minute I met him, because I had a feeling he knew something about being an ordinary creek fisherman at one time or another. He had a 16- foot yellow fiberglass bass-boat with stick steering, and he figured if I used it and wrote about it, I might help publicize his new company. He was calling it Ranger Boat Company.
I went up there to Flippin, Arkansas and visited with him one afternoon, and he had to know that I was just about the worst gamble he could take. I was so darned young and inexperienced I didn’t know how to run a foot control trolling motor. I told him I’d probably be able to paddle it, ‘cause I was better with my hands than my feet.
Mr. Wood had to have a lot of doubts about that transaction. The Arkansas Democrat and I were about to get one of his boats on what they call “consignment”, and he might not get a darn thing out of it. His wife wasn’t quite as confident in the transaction and she let it be known.
For awhile, I thought she might cancel out the whole thing, and you couldn’t blame her. I was a long way from what the bass fishing industry was about to be built on. I had no colorful shirt with patches on it, wasn’t a member of any bass club and hadn’t combed my hair since about four o’clock that morning. I had wet tennis shoes on from wading in the Buffalo River a few hours before, and I looked closer to 16 than 21. She made no bones about it, she figured giving me a boat meant losing one, and even the tax write-off wouldn’t be something my contribution would equal.
Of course, she didn’t know how right she was at the time and I didn’t either. I think the editors at the Arkansas Democrat were beginning to, though. A few months later, in early March, my Uncle Bryce, who lived in Springdale, Arkansas, sent me a picture of himself in his wooden johnboat holding up a big bass, which he had caught in a cove in nearby Beaver Lake. I told him I would be up the next day with a genuine fiberglass bass boat that would cross the lake somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 20 miles an hour, and I’d show him how to work a foot control motor.
So now the stage is set. Uncle Bryce gave me a new spinner bait called a “Spider” and I tied it on to my new 15-pound line which I had put on the Ambassadeur 5000 reel which Gloria Jean had bought me a year before for marrying her, knowing I’d much rather have that than a wedding ring. Uncle Bryce and I fished for three hours that morning on Beaver Lake without catching a fish, and he was grumbling about the boat’s yellow color and that humming trolling motor scaring away the bass.
Only about 200 yards from my pick-up, I made a cast in beside a big submerged log, and that big old spider-spinner bait just sort of stopped. I figured I had hung up on another stump, but this time the line began to move, and I knew that something heavy that had aholt of it.
With my luck back then, it might have been a big carp, maybe even a beaver. Uncle Bryce got a glimpse of it before I did, and when he began to whoop and holler, I knew that it was a bass.
It didn’t fight like any of the big smallmouth I had ever hooked in the Big Piney as a kid. This was a slow, steady hard pull, a deep fight that bent my rod to its extreme point. For the first time ever, that Ambassadeur 5000 reel, gleaming bright red in the late morning Beaver Lake sunlight, was giving line against the drag.
The fish was going under that big log, and I knew that if he didn’t break that line, I was about to get a picture of Forrest Wood’s yellow Ranger Bass boat on the outdoor page of next Sunday’s Arkansas Democrat newspaper.
If this is just more excitement than you can stand, I am awful sorry, but the story will have to be finished next week. Was this indeed my first 10-pound bass? Would Uncle Bryce be able to net it before the line broke? Would Mrs. Wood change her opinion of my fishing ability and total worth? Find out in next weeks exciting conclusion of this way-too-long story.
You can see pictures of the old bass boat on my website, and other photos to go with this column. Go to www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. You can also write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net.
