Larry Dablemont: New magazine editor quickly adjusts to fishing, lying about size

I caught a pretty good fish last week in the Ozarks, with high water everywhere after the heavy rains.

I went to the Pomme de Terre River above Truman Lake, where the high waters had back the lake way up into the stream. Several miles above the lake, in a swollen current created by heavy releases of water from Pomme de Terre Lake, white bass were running in large numbers, but scattered all over.

I took the editor of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal on her first white bass fishing trip, having told her back in March how great it was to find spawning white bass and how hard they fought. And then it didn’t happen.

Sondra Gray hasn’t fished a great deal, but she has learned enough from her brothers and husband to know how to cast well, and tie lures and that kind of thing. So it wasn’t a surprise to see her catch some nice bass this spring and her first limit of crappie. She didn’t need much teaching; in no time at all she was making accurate casts and landing her share of fish.

Sondra surprised herself. “I think that fishing is addictive,” she told me. “I can’t think of much else but catching fish anymore ... the anticipation of throwing a lure and realizing that any minute you are about to have a fish grab it and fight so hard, I think I am getting hooked on this.”

Indeed, she gets to fishing and seems mesmerized by it. So finally, with those white bass coming so late up the river, Sondra had an opportunity to catch a limit of white bass late in May. It wasn’t the topwater fishing that I like to see during the white bass run, but her brother gave her a white rooster-tail spinner and told her it was the lure to use, and he was right.

In two hours, she had hooked and landed a good number of whites, about half of them 15- to 17- inch females still full of eggs at the beginning of summer.

The current was strong, the river swollen, and the fight from even the smaller whites was challenging on the light spinning-rods we were both using. Early in the afternoon, they really opened the gates at the dam and the water began to get muddy, so thankfully in those first few hours of fishing, she caught her limit and then some. I hadn’t.

For some reason, the whites liked that rooster tail better than my small rogue lure, and I only had about six or seven fish.

A grizzled old veteran outdoorsman like me doesn’t like to be beaten at his own game, so I gave in and tied on small yellow spinner bait as the water began to rise, and quickly hooked a horse of a fish. On the light line, I didn’t expect to land it, but I gave it a lot of time to wear down. Sondra stood by with a net, and after about ten minutes she slipped it beneath a 24-inch hybrid, a cross between a white bass male and a striper female, a fish created by biologists in hatcheries, and released into various Midwestern waters, including Norfork and Truman lakes.

Sondra, of course, thought I had landed a record white bass until I showed her the difference in the hybrids, which isn’t easy to see. I think that fish might have weighed almost six pounds.

But the best was yet to come. Drifting down with the current, I told her the murky water and rising current had brought an early end to the white bass fishing when my spinner bait swept beneath an overhanging limb, and I felt a hard, solid strike. This was likely to be another hybrid, but I knew it was much larger than the other.

On that six-pound line, with the light spinning-rod, I wasn’t likely to land it. But I took the opportunity to teach my fishing partner what to do in such a situation. If you are going to edit an outdoor magazine, you have to know how to land a big fish. I let him take several yards of line with his runs, kept the rod arced hard against him to tire him, brought in line when I could, let him take it back when he made a strong run.

The key to it is keeping the big fish in open water, and tiring him just little by little, letting him take line against your drag so the pressure is never enough to break the line. If he had gotten himself into some brush it would have been over, but hybrids and stripers don’t do that like bass do. They fight deep and hard in open water, and you can tire them out in time.

That afternoon, it took 20 minutes, and we drifted down the river for a mile I suppose. My wrist and hands were beginning to ache from the fight. For a while it seemed the fish would never tire. Finally, he came up close enough, and Sondra make a swift move with the net and he was ours. My camera was on the blink, so she took a picture with her phone, and you can see it on my Web site.

It was 27 inches long and I think it might have weighed nine or ten pounds. You can write to me and give your own guess, as long as you guess it to be about that size or bigger. Sondra thinks it might have been bigger than 10 pounds, but then she’s new to this. It will be a long time before she gets to join our “grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen’s club.” But I don’t think it will be long before she is catching some really big fish and lying about their weight, just like we do.

The lady is addicted to fishing, if I ever knew it to happen. What I am hoping is, she won’t ask for any pay increases any time soon if she gets to fish a lot.

I expect to be finding lots of morel mushrooms this week, after finding very few this spring in the Ozarks. About the time you read this, I will be in Northwest Ontario fishing with old friend Tinker Helseth, who operates a lodge and fishing service out of Nestor Falls, Ontario on Lake of the Woods.

We fly out in his pontoon plane to some of the most isolated wilderness lakes you can imagine. There are so many you never seem to fish a place you remember, and it is different than anything you can imagine when fishing in the Ozarks.

This week in Canada, smallmouth bass and crappie should be beginning to spawn, and walleye will be found in shallower water than usual. The fishing should be great, and there should be a ton of morel mushrooms around the lakes.

But you never know. It is early spring in Canada and there are always spring fronts to contend with.

Next week I will tell you what happens, and there are always some great stories and great pictures from a week in Canada.

Volunteers from Tuscaloosa paying it forward in Joplin

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