Two years ago at the end of September, about 6 or 7 in the evening, I was fishing a lonely stretch of river that is far from any public access where it was quiet and still.

I had fished the better part of the eddy for 30 minutes and I had caught several nice bass, both blacks and brownies, but the big one I had seen there a day or so before had never shown himself.

I moved down the eddy and just above the shoal, I made one last cast with a buzz bait, against an unlikely looking bank with a gravel substrate, only about three feet deep. The bass I was after had moved to that shallow water looking for crawdads I suppose, and he couldn’t let that surface-sputtering contraption pass. He clobbered it, and he stripped line against my drag for the first six or eight feet of his run, as I bent my rod and watched him go.

It is again that time to fish an Ozark stream, if you know how, and if you have the inclination to work hard enough to do it. I say that because the really good stretches of some of our rivers are low and there are shoals you have to pull over. It keeps the capsize-and-chaos canoers and kayakers at home, because the swifter deeper water they like isn’t found there.

But for the next few weeks, smallmouth bass, and the largemouth too, because many of these Ozark rivers are full of largemouth as well, are as active as they will be any time of year, feeding all day and feeding ravenously.

It is topwater time, for those of us who would rather fish that way than any way, and specifically it is time for buzz baits, the big-bladed sputterbugs which ride across the surface kicking up water as they go. They appear to be something which you’d think, if you didn’t know better, would scare every bass in the hole.

Buzz baits will work as well on our reservoirs too, if you get back into the places where bass move to shallower water as fall comes on. But on our streams, big smallmouth can’t seem to let one go past without taking a swipe at it. And that seems to be what they do at times, just take a swipe at it.

You see so many really large bass splash water all over, just missing the lure, whether intentionally or not, sometimes two or three times without getting ahold of it. But then, some zero in on it, and make little commotion at all as they just seem to intercept its path and suck it under.

It is a killer lure, but to use the big ones which catch big bass, you have to be an experienced fisherman who can put a lure where you want it, and use an open-faced casting reel. Spin-cast fishermen can’t fish a buzz spin as well because with spinning reels it is hard to keep the lure on the surface, and it does not float.

That bass two years ago wasn’t a brownie you’d want to catch on a spinning outfit with light line, though I often fish the rivers that way this time of year with small floaters like the Rapala and poppers. That was a bass for heavy gear and it was a fight you dream about, in the flowing water above the shoal, as he came out of water twice and I let him wear himself down as he struggled. I finally just slipped out of my canoe and eased it to the bank, and landed him with my free hand.

He was a monster. In Ozark rivers, and during 50 years of fishing them, I have only seen three or four smallmouth that were bigger. And while I have landed bigger ones in the far northern waters of Canada, I have never caught a bigger fish in the Ozarks.

Actually, it wasn’t a he, it was a she. If she had been full of eggs she would have exceeded five and one half pounds. I estimated the big brownie at 5 and a quarter, and after a couple of photos, I released it. I haven’t caught it since, but I believe it is still there, and I guarantee I will fish that water again in September this year with a buzz bait.

I’ll guarantee you something else, too. Because of the buzz-bait, and rivers which are low and slow and forsaken by the masses, I will have some more pictures soon, of big hefty smallmouth. I’ll release all of them, and I hope you will too.

Baron the beginner

After I write this, and well before you read it, I will hunt doves with a beginner. He is ready and wide-eyed, and his tongue hangs out with excitement about half the time. Baron is a one-year-old chocolate Labrador full of instinct and good intentions, but without a lot of brains just yet.