May 10, 2002

• Before I begin, a word on night fishing and why anyone would want to. What ends up happening is that you create a small ecosystem, kind of like a late-night minnow bar for insomniac sufferers of the aquatic persuasion. You put out lanterns, we were using 5 Coleman Double-mantel propane lanterns, and you wait.

  
  

  Now, the waiting part is the key. Any look at Sunday afternoon TV will leave you with the impression that fishing is all about nancing around a lake in a $38,000 bass boat trying to out-guess the fish and find out where they are. Not always. The key to this particular method, and there are many, is to setup and let the fish come to you.

  
  

  Zane’s condensed theory of night fishing:

  
  

  
  
  • The light attracts the bugs
  
  
  • The bugs die in the water
  
  
  • They attract the minnows and smaller bait fish
  
  
  • The larger bait fish come and set up a ruckus
  
  
  • The combination of that and the tempting pool of lights bring in the big ones like first semester freshmen to a keg party…even if it IS Milwaukee’s Best or Shaffer.

  
  

  Well, that’s the theory we’re working with anyway….so suspend disbelief for a bit if you must, and stick with me.

  
  

  Day Two: Bugs, bugs, and Bugs!

  
  

  For most of us,  bugs and flying insects are a damn nuisance, they get in your hair, on your skin, in your ears, nose, mouth…generally give you the willies, and are NOT considered a food group. It is important to note that one stage of night fishing is probably the most uncomfortable ordeal anyone has been through, particularly first-timers. This is stage where the *bugs* begin to show up. They swarm around the lights and above the water in a cloud of silent chaos only broken up by the occasional fly-by which can be reduced by a heavy coat of skeeter repellent, and by sitting in the middle of the boat away from the lights. This will put you just on the edge of the cloud, but it still makes you a rest stop..kind of the first wet bar foot rail closest to the dance floor, if you will. What may keep you going and not just erupt in a fit of cuss words and flailing appendages is the fact that it will, at most, only last about 2 hours…and usually a light breeze brings relief from time to time during that wait. After a bit, most of the bugs within the attraction radius of the lamps will be in the water or stuck to the lanterns and the night will be as quiet and still as a church on Super Bowl Sunday…broken occasionally by a well-timed belch and the fit of shouted scores by the judges that follows. 

  
  

  The key word here, and for the rest of the night, is waiting. Never pull up anchor and untie to move just because you’ve been there for 2 hours and not gotten a bite. If for no other reason, you’ll have to go through the bug-letting again, and that’s only slightly less fun than shaving yourself with a vegetable peeler soaked in Tabasco.

  
  

  On day one, there were NO bugs because a constant wind was blowing across the lake. I was wet and a bit cold, so every once it a while I’d squint into the breeze as if to say “That’s enough, I get the point already!”. Well on this day, I got payback. On our way out to the cove, the lake was a Teflon-flat mirror. I kind of felt like a fly trapped in a bathroom, stuck to the mirror…lost in an actual-size painting of…everything. Of course it wasn’t until we got set up and the insects started to show up that I realized what that meant. The swarm of bugs around the boat about 20 min after the sun dropped was….if you’ll pardon a double Haigism…Spielbergically Hitchcockian in it’s size, density, and duration. The only thing missing was a sound track with a repeating violin note and a camera shot from inside one of the lanterns looking up through a cloud of bugs seemingly intent on sucking the oxygen out of the air and dousing the ever-evil Colemans and their siren-call glow.

  
  

  Now, before this trip out, and this happens on just about every vacation, we had to make a trip to Wal-Mart. Is it just me or does day one of every vacation, particularly ones where you have to bring supplies (camping, boating, fishing, skiing…gambling, etc.) result in an immediate reassessment of the supplies list? It seems like very time I head out, after the first day, my neat little list of checkmarks on a legal pad seems to laugh back at me in defiance as if to say, “Think again, wake-board boy.” So, we’re at WallyWorld picking up all the stuff we forgot to put on the list and buy before we left. And well, there’s just something not right; I realized that it felt just like when I visited Oklahoma. I was driving around for about 2 hours, my subconscious pestering me the whole time, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. Something was off ever since I crossed the boarder, but I didn’t know what it was…couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Finally the magnetic field in the car aligned, or a blood clot came loose, or that last bit of undigested Taco Bell slipped through my duodenum, or whatever and a couple of synapses closed in my brain and I realized it was the fact that none of the cars had front license plates. Not only that, but there was no ugly ‘bracket’ in the front for them either. That was it, these cars are PRETTIER than the Texas cars…because let’s face it, a big ole plate bracket on the front of a Dodge Viper is NOT a beauty mark…it’s a cold sore. Well the same thing happened here…but I recognized the feeling so I figured it was something visual and different. This time it didn’t take two hours, all the packages had French translations on them. It was too cool…like a shop and learn sort of thing, only I’m not that fast a learner so I can’t remember the French words for stool, diarrhea or condom even though I thought to check those items at the time…so it was lost on me as a learning tool, surprise. We had gone to the other side of the lake and were in Louisiana at a Wal-Mart…thus the extra wording on everything. Simple.

  
  

  Mystery solved, I bought two minnow buckets and an extra basket…oh yea, did I mention the aeration pump on the minnow cooler didn’t work either that first day? Heck, we were catching stuff with dead minnows anyway, but you can’t ‘hurry up and fish before the bait dies’, ya know? I also got bought one of those new blue led flashlights…these things are cool! I have some ideas for these LEDs as well, but I’ll share that later.

  
  

  [to be continued]

  • 5:05 pm
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