Modest success; some fish, a bog, a plan

One of fishing’s attractions is that it’s open-ended. Angling can be exacting and technical but it doesn’t have to be. Opportunities for experimentation, improvisation and self-education are endless.
So, it follows that one of the most satisfying aspects of a fishing trip is figuring out what works and how to present a fly, lure or bait, on that day, to actually catch fish. Sometimes that success is sweetened with the spice of surprise.
A Fish and Boat Commission lake lolls in a shallow, mountaintop valley near my home. Until some recent trips, I had never done well fishing there, despite the known presence of bass, crappies and pike. The lake presents such an appealing setting that often my fishing endeavors have turned into birding excursions, paddling around in the standing timber watching ospreys, flushing wood ducks, or trailing behind beavers hoping to hear the concussive blast of their tail-slap warning. Twice while paddling there I have heard that high-pitched chirping squeal that doesn’t sound like it should come from its regal source, looked up and beheld bald eagles soaring over the water lily flats.
The lake’s troublesome weed growth exceeds even my vegetable garden’s annual crop of undesired vegetation. By mid-summer you must follow beaver channels to maneuver the shallows, and any wobbling crankbait is doomed to weed-fouling unless you cast into the deepest central channel. Sitting on the surface in a kayak, it is apparent that the lake was once a bog, before a modest concrete dam impounded its ooze. It’s trying its best to become a bog again. Its ultimate success in this is inevitable.
Recently, I made a deliberate effort to fish the lake with some success. I hauled my fishing kayak up there on four evenings within a single week, got caught in thunderstorms that roiled up over Laurel Ridge before I could churn back to the launch ramp, savored the solitude, and caught some nice largemouth bass — more than I had boated over 25 years of sporadic visits there.
The difference was that I paid attention. At one point near dusk, to reduce paddling, I cut across a weed mat and bulled through the biomass. Everywhere along my course across the salad, swirls of heavy fish rumpled the green carpet from below — bass probably, flushed from their ambush sites the way you might boot grouse from among grapevines. I stopped paddling and sat in the dusk watching and listening. Signs of feeding fish were all around — swirls among the weeds, slurpy suction under the lily pads, violent splashes in random openings across the mat.
How, I wondered, is it possible to fish right in among these weeds? Not along the edges, and not in the open water beyond, but right in the dense tangles, snarled under the shadows of the shoreline trees.
I dug a dull-green, soft-plastic tube jig with flailing, trailing skirt-legs from the compact tackle box that rides amidships between my knees. I clipped off the floating-diving stickbait from which I’d been pulling strands of milfoil every cast and tied on a simple, offset No. 1 hook. I then pierced the tube-bait’s head with the point and threaded the jig onto the shank until the point protruded, well back on the body. Finally, I turned the hook so that I could re-insert the point and push it through the jig until the business end rested just inside the jig’s outer “skin” on the opposite side. The result was a barely perceptible bulge where the point rested under the plastic epidermis, safe from weed snags but poised to emerge in a fish’s lip.
By then I’d been sitting motionless in the gathering dark for a long time, and the aquatic world around my boat had accepted its presence as it did the fallen logs that clot the shallows. I lobbed the tube into a nearby opening, where it met the water with a life-like splat. The bordering pads rose up and swirled, my line streaked back toward the cover and I set the hook to that satisfying feel of a weighty fish. The bass pulled hard then tangled in weeds so that the fight, which started fierce, ended in hauling dead weight. No matter; I’d caught a nice bass by observing and adapting, and I caught a dozen or so more before full dark.
While there remained just enough light to take photos, a fish flashed a surprising hot-orange tint as I reeled it close. When I’d pulled off the festooning weeds I held perhaps the largest yellow perch I have ever caught. “I’d like to have about a dozen of these. That would make 24 nice fillets for a fish fry,” I fantasized. Then I readjusted. “Nah, it’s good just to be out here, this time catching some fish.”