By Silas Gray

sports@joplinglobe.com

Brad Cardwell is a friend of mine from Carthage who likes to fish.

Several weeks ago, we had picked a Saturday that we both had free and decided that we’d either go fishing at some private ponds that he has leased or float Shoal Creek.

Brad’s passion is creek and river fishing. He’s truly at home with a paddle in his hand while working his way along an Ozark stream in one of his canoes. We watched the water level and clarity of the creek, hoping that both would reach acceptable levels before that Saturday arrived.

We talked the night before our trip, and, unfortunately, all our recent rains had kept the creek too high for good boat control. We were happy that we’d made a backup plan as we headed toward the ponds.

We were meeting early, and the fog was so thick that it was almost a drizzle as I made my way over to Brad’s house. He was loaded and ready with his canoe trailer attached when I pulled up. I transferred my gear, and we were soon on our way toward the acreage containing the two ponds that we’d be fishing that day.

We followed a narrow lane that passed through row after row of tall stalks of corn whose ears were bursting through the shucks, apparently ready for harvest. The first pond we fished was the smaller of the two. Brad backed the trailer down to the water’s edge where it was easy to slide the canoe into the water.

Brad began to paddle, working the boat along the pond’s weedy shoreline. I tied a medium-sized popping bug using straight 12-pound monofilament for a leader to my five-weight fly rod and began casting around the sparse brush and into open spots that had formed in the weeds.

On the third cast, just as it was landing, the lure was snatched up by a feisty half-pound largemouth. Paddling on, we caught several more bass that were practically the same size as the first, missing more than we landed.

By the time we’d made a single trip around the pond, it was ten in the morning. Since the largest bass we’d caught so far weighed less than a pound, we decided that it was time to try the larger pond.

The second impoundment was surrounded with trees, offering the bass plenty of shade in which they could hide and wait to ambush passing prey.

The action on the second pond started off quickly with Brad and me both missing nice fish right away. Both fish appeared much larger than the ones we had caught earlier.

We began landing bass, and, except for an occasional three-quarter-pound fish, they were all pretty nice. At one point, as I was hauling another bass on board, we both laughed as one of us said, “Just another two-pounder.”

I’m not sure how many bass we caught and released that day. We spent hours working plastic worms, poppers, jitterbugs and buzzbaits using both fly rods and conventional tackle in, around and through the thick willow trees making casts into small pockets of water where, many times, a bass would be waiting. We wouldn’t always land the fish, but the hunt was a lot of the fun.