My Bass Tournament Experience

Rule #64:  When a politician utters the words, "the American people," you can be sure of two things:  first, the next words out of his or her mouth will be a bold-faced lie; and second, you should really grab onto your wallet as fast as you can.


MY BASS TOURNAMENT EXPERIENCE


As a graduate student, I was in a strange world.

I was, as I had always been, a Muncie hillbilly.  On the other hand, I was also a graduate student in English and American Literature, and my colleagues were NPR-loving, brie-eating, Volvo-driving, WONDERFUL folk.

Misguided, sure, but still wonderful.  I loved them, and they put up with me.

My best friend in grad school was of the "brie-eating" tribe, but he was a great guy nevertheless!  We were tipped off  by one of the secretaries that there was a local bass tournament at our newest reservoir about 25 miles south of my home.  Since it was a "local" tournament, my friend and I decided that we could maybe enter and have a chance, even though we only had my 12' jon-boat that was held together with a distressing amount of Bond-O.  We wrangled a small outboard motor from the Department Chair and figured we were ready.

My wife made me some bologna, mayo, and cheese sandwiches and threw in a couple of V-8's and three Budweisers.   I was thrilled!!

We showed up well before the starting time, yanked that boat out of the back of my truck, drug it--scraping Bond-O all the way down the ramp to the water, and "launched" her!  Well, actually, we pulled it over to the single wooden pier beside the ramp and tried for the first time to attach our motor to our boat.

Wrestling with the ancient outboard, we couldn't help but notice that the ramp was filling up with ENORMOUS bass boats that no doubt cost ten times our combined annual salary!  Were there any other boats requiring the pier?  No.  Were there any other boats made (mostly) of aluminum? No.

. . . and, could we get the engine started, well, no.  An air horn signaled the start and what seemed like thousands of huge Mercury's flared into action as fiberglass beauties fairly shot across the surface of the reservoir.  And we sat and watched them.  After a moment, we grabbed a couple of oars, and made our way, with the wind behind us, to a stand of flooded timber that looked kind of "fishy," about twenty yards from the pier, and then tossed out our "anchor," which I'd made by filling an empty gallon milk jug with Sacrete and tying twenty feet of nylon rope to it.

We sat in our boat until our fingers began to get numb before we remembered we had lunches, each prepared by our respective wives.  I popped a beer and opened a sandwich bag, thinking all the while that this could perhaps make my day turn around.

I have noticed many times while fishing that things can start going bad within the first few minutes and you just know that this day is not a day you're going to enjoy, and that the first thing that went wrong--maybe your first cast ended up so high in a tree you'd have to cut it down to retrieve your lure!  And in your heart you know that was just the first thing to go bad, that the rest of the day will be one long chain of such incidents.  Yet, some very few times, I have been able to stop everything, take a breath, maybe sit down, take a sip of coffee; then, when I start again, I can do so almost like it was the beginning of a new day.  Sometimes, some very few times, this will work.

Unfortunately, this was not such a time.

I looked over at my friend, opening the lunch he and his wife had prepared.  First, came the cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off, then from an ironically red plaid Thermos, gazpacho.

Yes, gazpacho.  On a nasty, cold Indiana day, my friend was eating cucumber sandwiches and cold soup.

Now I've spent a lot of time in boats, fishing by myself, but usually with someone else.  Really, just with "the Doc," I've spent hundreds of hours on the water, and never, I mean NEVER, have I come so close to throwing someone overboard!

Obviously, we caught colds, but no fish.  In the end, we decided to leave early in order to avoid the embarrassment of "ramping" our boat when the others did.

And eventually (after the other two beers) I was able to quietly forgive my friend.

The next time we went fishing, although I had a legendary hangover, I caught dozens of largemouth--FROM THE BANK!!--and the biggest catfish I had ever seen.  But the final redemptive moment of the day occurred when my friend opened the same plaid thermos and poured us each a cup of coffee (now it WAS Hazelnut or something, but what the hell)  AND he had a small sack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches--on white bread--which along with the coffee, constituted the single best meal I had ever had!!