RutlandHerald.com - We Are Vermont

The Streamside Guide

A new column by blogger Peter Cammann

Editor's Note:

Welcome to our first column by noted angler, former fishing guide, and author Peter Cammann. Now a blogger, Cammann, 50, lives in Waitsfield and blogs at www.thestreamsideguide.com.

I have done many foolish things while fishing. I hooked a seagull about 25 years ago casting for striped bass in Massachusetts. This was back in the bad old days when I regularly used live bait, a practice I have long since abandoned.

This decision to dispense with fishing with “naturals” as they are sometimes called had more to do with my social calendar than it did with ethics. It became readily apparent that the odor that pervaded me of the mackerel and menhaden I routinely used was making me less and less popular among my alleged friends and so for their sakes, I eventually took to using artificial flies and lures exclusively. In any case, the seagull in question on that fateful day was attracted by the sight and smell of my bait as it plopped on the water. The noisy bird swooped down and chomped into the fleshiest, most rancid part of the fish’s abdomen and neatly hooked itself in the bill.

There are few things that can compare to the sight of a grown man, fighting an angry gull with a boat rod, particularly when said gull is flying about thirty feet overheard, screaming bloody murder! However, I can promise you that I have achieved even more ludicrous feats of angling ineptitude.

One summer evening, I caught and landed two bats while fishing on the Winooski River…on consecutive casts…using a spinning rod. I’ve had bats chase my fly line as I flicked it at rising trout before, but this was a bit different. Both bats had followed a metal lure as it arced through the air and they only made their respective attacks just as the lure had hit the water. This was then, very unusual bat behavior and I strongly suspect that both bats I caught probably look back on that evening with some chagrin. I felt extremely silly myself, mostly because the guy I was fishing with kept asking me if I needed to borrow his net to land my catch.

By the way, never, ever fish with a #1 silver Mepps after sunset – unless of course you have first rubbed it down with garlic and braided wolfs bane around its treble hook.

Every once in a while though, an opportunity for true buffoonery presents itself.

Most of the time, I content myself with missing strikes and then uttering a string of colorful Anglo-Saxon phrases. I feel these ancient phrases are a birthright and so I use them with a sense of tribal pride, allowing me to relieve the stress of the day while boning up on my ancient language skills.

I went to one of my favorite pieces of smallmouth bass water one day in May and had a splendid afternoon of fishing. The fish were in a highly excited mood and they struck at the many types of plastic baits we threw to them. I was fishing with my good friend Mike Russo and he did best by working a four inch long brown grub on a quarter ounce lead head jig while I found some measure of success with a six inch green plastic worm. We let the lures count all the way down to the bottom and then just barely twitched them along the floor. The fish slammed into the baits with great enthusiasm and they almost immediately headed for the surface where they jumped before running. The smallest bass we caught was a foot long while the rest ranged between 17 and 18 ½ inches.

Both of us had gotten strikes by casting against a tree that was resting on its side in the water. Years of erosion had torn the soil out from around the roots, causing the whole thing to slip neatly in against the bank, providing a good 20 feet of cover for the fish to hide in. While we’d both accidentally gotten our baits snagged in the branches a couple times trying to land our casts in close, neither of us had lost our jigs. So it was with no particular concern then that I flipped my bait at the big log and got ready to feel for another strike.

I was surprised at how hard the fish hit and how it resisted when I set the hook. This was a really strong bass! It came to the surface quickly, but instead of leaping, it thrashed its tail angrily and submerged. Almost instantly though, it was back on the surface again. It actually looked like the big fish was struggling to dive, as if it was being held up against the water’s top. Mike edged over next to where I stood and we stared.

The fish’s head was now fully out of the water, its body perpendicular to the surface. It appeared suspended, unable to move. And that’s because…it was suspended! Mike started to laugh like hell because my fish was hung up, the line wound around one of the tree’s branches. Apparently I had missed this tiny detail during my cast and now I’d caught a fish, but the tree had caught me. The more the fish and I struggled, the higher the bass seemed to creep until it hung there, a good 6 inches above the water. I spooled out a little line and it slid back in.

Mike decided to try sacrificing his body. He took my rod and waded into the deep pool. Why I didn’t realize that he was merely trying to steal my fish eludes me now. I’m normally very suspicious of other people, particularly when they offer to take my fishing gear when I have a fish on, a damned big fish at that too. It didn’t really make any difference though because try as he did, Mike couldn’t shake that line off the branch. Now I was laughing. He smiled sheepishly and handed me back the rod, his smirk seeming to say, “You figure it out if you’re so smart”.

I didn’t fare much better and the bass slid in and out of the water like a yo-yo as I tried to work the line free. Finally, the fish decided that she’d had quite enough and with one muscular shake of her head, she broke the line and disappeared. The green water seemed to swallow her right up. I dropped my hands to my side, clenched my fists, and began to recite a long, familiar Anglo-Saxon tinged incantation.

Copyright 2008 by Peter Cammann. You can email him at vtangler2001@yahoo.com

This article originally appeared in The Streamside Guide Blog in May, 2008. To read the latest posts from Cammann, go to www.thestreamsideguide.com