Column: A Once-In-A Lifetime Fish
LARRY DABLEMONT PHOTO
Larry Dablemont’s first attempt at a selfie with his once-in-a-lifetime fish, 20 inches long and weighing in at 6 pounds.
Rotten luck, that’s all you can call it! The day before my birthday, in mid-October, I was fishing in Canada, way out in the Lake of the Woods, and found a great spot for walleye in a remote wilderness spot. I was catching a lot of them — many between 18 and 20 inches long — hard-fighting glassy-eyed rascals, with some 12-inch yellow perch mixed in. Who could ask for a better day? There I was in a peaceful and beautiful setting, out of the wind without another boat or human within miles.
At the edge of darkness, I started my motor and headed for my cabin, six miles away, with a cold wind in my face and strong waves buffeting my boat. I was there five or six days and the temperature stayed above 40 degrees the whole time, never more than a 15 mph wind. Canada at its best! Most years in mid-October I am there, elated with fishing and grouse hunting and getting some writing done. At the dawn of my birthday, Oct. 11, I walked down to my boat and found that the starter on my motor was done for. Fried … done for. Rotten luck! But … if it had happened the night before I would have been sleeping on a nearby sand beach, trying to keep a fire going, listening to the howl of timber wolves on Wolf Island. An adventure to write about, perhaps fending off a pack of timber wolves. But no! Darn rotten luck!
There I was, below my cabin at the dawn of my birthday, with no outboard motor. I headed for Tinker Helseth’s nearby lodge to tell him I was on my way back to Missouri. Tinker’s son-in-law recommended that I just go fish for smallmouth bass on a nearby small lake, where I could get around with only my trolling motor. I have fished that lake before, putting in with my War-Eagle boat down a little lane that few know about. When I did, I caught dozens of big smallmouth, one after another, just drifting across a windy rocky point. Few lakes in Canada have shown me such smallmouth fishing. I have never seen another boat on it. Amazing!
In October last year I caught lots of smallmouth there above four pounds and two or three at five pounds or close. In Canada, an eighteen-inch smallmouth will outweigh the same length bass from the Ozarks streams by nearly a pound. I remember a spot off the point where I hooked and lost a giant brownie that I thought might be the biggest I had ever hooked. Was he still there? He was … in almost the same spot. I hooked him again, or one like him. He nearly took my light-action spinning outfit with him when he hit. But I had the single-hook jig set well, and I loosened my drag, hoping the six-pound line would hold.
He made hard and powerful dives and runs that took him 20 feet away from the boat, and that rod arced like I had never seen it bow. Just a few minutes before I had hooked a 6- or 7-pound northern and landed it. When you have fished Canadian waters for forty years as I have, you learn to tell the difference in the struggle of a northern pike and a smallmouth. I had no doubt the fish struggling below me, making my drag whine, was a brownie.
Your impulse is to horse them a bit, but this once I used my head. I knew I would never see him if I didn’t let him wear himself out. It took about ten minutes, but he did wear down, and finally I saw him about three feet beneath me in that clear water, broadside. I nearly lost my composure … almost jumped in after him! Thank goodness that starter had gone out. Because of that I was about to land the largest smallmouth of my life. I made a swipe at the monster with my net, and missed him. I figured that miss would reinvigorate the bass, maybe let him escape. That’s what usually happens when you miss. But swipe number two brought him into the boat, and I sat there looking at the first six-pound smallmouth I have ever landed. He was flopping on the floor of my boat on my birthday. I don’t keep smallmouth now, as I did when I was young and my family just about lived on fish, ducks, rabbits and squirrels. But I would keep this one. I drove to a small grocery store in Nestor Falls Ontario to have it weighed. Six pounds, four ounces, the lady said. I will have a new goal now … a seven pounder!
That night Tinker’s family had a birthday dinner for me. It was a great meal with birthday cake and ice cream, and a half-dozen folks embarrassed me by singing that happy birthday song. I think it was the first time I have ever had anyone sing “happy birthday” to me. And it was the first time, after more than sixty-five years of trying, that I have caught a six-pound smallmouth. All that is left to do is try for a seven-pounder, over the next twenty years or so. I have some more to write about the fall in Ontario in next week’s column.
Larry Dablemont is a naturalist and outdoor writer who writes a weekly outdoor column for 30 newspapers in three states.
