Every Day Was Special

It was shortly after the arrival of the new year. The snow drifts around the north side of my barn stood eight feet deep, and the red stuff in the thermometer outside my kitchen window was barely half an inch tall, when I got an e-mail from Skip Rood. In the subject space he had written, Second Annual Big Lake Smallmouth Trip, and it had been copied to Art Currier. It was just what I needed. This is what Skip wrote. Hey Bill and Art, time to start thinking about our second annual excursion to the big lake. It's never too early to get these things etched in stone. I'm looking at some time the first week in June, which I think we've learned is when the smallmouths should be on shore and vulnerable to a well-cast clouser or, even better if we're lucky, a well-burbled taps-deer-hair bug. You guys check your calendars so we can zero in on a date and also a rain date. I suggest Tuesday of that week, with Wednesday for backup, but we can do whatever works for you. Meanwhile, tie a bunch of flies, oil your reels, re-tie your leaders. I'll be tinkering with the motor and scraping the rust off the hull of the old boat. The previous year—our first annual Big Lake Smallmouth Trip, I guess we can now call it, though we didn't call it that at the time—we'd launched Skip's ancient aluminum rowboat in the last week of May. Too early, as it turned out. Spawning urges had not yet impelled the smallmouth bass to move into the shallow water. Along the drop-offs in the vodka-clear lake water, when the light was right, we could see the big females cruising near the bottom in ten or twelve feet of water. Too deep for practical fly-fishing. We figured that in a week or so we'd find them in the shallower water along the boulder-strewn shorelines and over the gravel bars. We nailed a few of the smaller males who'd already ventured into spawning-bed territory. But the fishing was way slower than we all remembered it from the old days. Actually, for me, this wouldn't be the second annual Big Lake Smallmouth Adventure. More like the twentieth or twenty-fifth, except there was a twenty-year gap in the middle.