I have always found it interesting that it is virtually impossible to wake up on time for work or church without somewhat rushing to catch up (although this has gotten significantly easier since I have aged, now I can't sleep in even when I want too.) but let it be the morning of a fishing trip and you have to leave the house by 4:30am you will wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed as though some mystical force has awoken you for the epic battle for the human race itself.
So there I was at 4:30am sitting on the side of my bed shaking out the sleep from my brain and getting dressed in the dark, all while trying not to wake my wife and the baby. Suddenly my phone notifies me that my dad is on his way. I rush up the stairs to wake my son (who ABSOLUTELY HATES getting up early, fishing or not). I wake him with the promise of coffee and we wait on the deck for our passage, to the mighty Truman lake, to arrive.
Approximately an hour and a half later we pull up to the Bucksaw Marina and load the boat to go hunting crappie and catfish for the day. The temperature was perfect. Not to hot, not to cold, just right. So we pull out of the no wake zone and my son has us pull around to the other side of a small jetty right there at the drop point (if you know this marina you know what I am talking about) the water had to be low because the jetty is usually covered by water except for the point itself, this time you could walk the entire length of it if you so desired. So we get around to the south east side of the jetty and he begins to cast the throw net. The first 2 tries where wildly unsuccessful with nary a shad to show for it. On the 3rd cast, however, he pulls in 7 nice size shad and to be honest we could have been done with the shad at this point. So we decide to pitch or dip the stumps on the west bank, just across the channel. The first couple of casts went fruitless but on the next cast I hooked into a fish I thought could have been a small catfish or a small bass (I should note here that I use a 4.4 ft. micro lite pole and reel for crappie fishing, it gives a greater sense of fight with smaller fish). I pull it into the boat and it's a fat 13 1/2 inch crappie. I was more than excited. My day could have ended here this was my record to date and I was thrilled. Nothing could go wrong now (hahahaha whatever). while I am dipping these stumps my son decided it would be a good time to catch a few more shad, you know just for good measure. On his first cast out he caught ... I cannot tell you the number as it was so many that it would be impossible to count by sight. They were small though in fact many were caught between the netting itself but I personally like the small ones, you can hook 3 or 4 on your hook and you know something will try to run your line. He does this one more time and the live well was chuck full of bait. I am still stunned as to how many shad he caught in those 5 minutes.
With a live well full of shad and a record crappie we decided to head down the channel and try our luck at a few spots we were given from a friend. I let everyone know we are heading out and to get settled and everyone agrees. I throw the throttle all the way forward and off we go. We had not gotten to the first turn when my dad screams "hey I lost my hat" so I pull back on the throttle and we spin around and see it floating on top of the water, so we head back to grab it. With hat in hand, we turn back around and head out full force. Once again, before we get to the first turn my dad hollers "crap my pole" I shut down and he explains the his pole just went into the water. We searched for about 5-10 minutes with no luck. The suck about this is that he just bought the reel at BPS less then 3 mo. ago. Dad decides that we need to get on fishing and we head out again at full force. This time we make it all the way to our crappie spot. All in all the crappie fishing was poor (our skill not the bite, still working on this but there was a storm coming in so that may have had something to do with it and that is what I will blame it on). So here we are trying to crappie fish when my dad hollers "son of a gun" and I feel him leaning on my back hard. My son (who runs the trolling motor from the bow) turns and looks and starts laughing. He jumps up and sits next to me and reaches under my father's seat, which has completely broken and is now resting on my sons arm and my back. So we get dad standing up and pull the seat out and get it stowed. My dad decides it might be ok to place the blue painters bucket, we carry, over the seat post and sit on this. Now for many of us this would probably have been a feasible solution for the remainder of the trip but dad (as you know, If you read my blogs) has seen many moons and his stability isn't what it use to be. We all get settled a bit and my boy starts the trolling motor up and boom dad and bucket to the ground or should I say deck of the boat, now this probably would have been a bit more humorous except that he cut his arm or tore his skin pretty good. But even he was laughing at this point. So my son jumps back and helps him up. while my son returns to his position in the boat he trips over the oar (a hand made oar my dad made at the beginning of this fishing season) and snaps it in half. At this point the entire boat erupts in laughter. We were crying, it was so funny.
We are all settled and decided "well heck we've gone through all this, we might as well head to our known good catfish spot and chill for a little while." so off we go without incident. As we are sitting in our spot which happens to be right out off the channel itself in the middle of the lake my son notices HUGE storm clouds coming in from the northeast and more importantly we can see the wall of rain coming right at us. Now I don't have to tell you that at this point we barely cared we had fought to be here right now and DANGIT WE AREN'T MOVING!! My son has the brilliant idea (no sarcasm) to take off his shirt so the when the rain does pass we have dry shirts to put on soooo... off come the shirts. Now it's plenty warm outside but can I tell you that rain coming from 3 thousand ft. up is COLD. it was much unpleasant but I was in the military and I have dealt with much colder and much hotter conditions but we weren't moving. I caught a small cat and after the rain died we realized we had been at this spot far to long so we decided to go grab some lunch and head back out. and that is what we did. score Jeff: 1 record crappie and 1 eater blue cat; dad and cubs: nothing.
Dad decided he would buy a new chair at Walmart and we had some Mexican for lunch. we hit the water around 1:30 and headed to a spot that has yet to fail us. I tried a bit of crappie fishing but this spot really isn't a spot to catch sizable crappie so back to good ole catfishing. This was amazing my dad pulled in the biggest of the day and probably the last couple of years. but the real story at this point was my son. Cubs caught one or 2 decent catfish but he was tired and threw his line out and expected to lay down in the boat and chill (this would not be the case). We were chatting about something when WHAMMM the tip of the rod bent over as though it was pointing at the fish that clearly had been hooked. My son jumped up and grabbed his rod, set the hook and started reeling.... the fight was on. when he pulled this beautiful monster into the boat we were all giddy at how beautiful this thing was, the light blue and pink shading and the sheer size was awesome. He gets the hook out of the fishes lip and he is hold her up in mighty glory when.... the lid to the live well was closed and the fish decided she was going to have one last ditch wiggle to break free, my son looses his grip and the fish ...no kidding... bounces off the live well and yes, into the water. Have you ever seen confusion, anger and acceptance all come over the face of a young person at the same moment? He was FURIOUS and went dead silent. In an effort to console my boy I looked at him and smiled and said "alright look get that pole rigged up we know there are more just like that in here and we can't catch them if we spend our time being upset about that, besides you still won, you caught the big fish." but it hurt me almost as much as it did him.
We spent about another hour fishing then headed to the state park marina to clean our fish. We took home about 5 lb.'s or more of fillets so it was a great day but man we earned them fish.... for shore.
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!!!
Until next time cast a big net and keep tight lines
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