Summer Better Than Others
Ashley Reservoir. August 1960.
So me and my cousin Danny and our buddy Snag headed out early one morning with our fishing poles and Mitchell 300 reels. We had some Daredevil lures (you know, the classic red and whites) and a can of worms. We had our Heath bars in our pockets. And oh yeah, we had some stringers to haul back the lunkers we hoped to catch.
For the first coupla hours the mosquitoes were the only ones bitin’, so we moseyed over to another pond. Along the way, we stopped to talk to this guy who looked like a young Clint Eastwood. Texas tall and thin as a branding iron. He was an Air Force pilot from Westover. Back then, Westover was a full-blown Air Force base.
While we were blabber-assin’ with him, Clint landed the biggest bass I’d ever seen. Then he caught another one and another after that. What the Christ? So I said, “Hey Bub, what the hell are you using for bait?” He told me it was a Heddon Tiny Torpedo. I’d never heard of the thing and neither had my two sidekicks.
A little while later, Clint had to get back to the base and he asked us if we wanted to keep the three mambo bass he caught. Whoa, Jimmy Jack Johnson we did! I saw a prime bragging opportunity there. I said to the boys, “I got an idea. Let’s say we caught these hound dogs.”
My straight-laced cousin didn’t like to lie. So I said, “Hey lunkhead, here’s what we’re gonna do. I’ll throw one of the bass to you and you catch it and you throw one to me and I’ll catch it. You get the picture. Then we can say not only did we catch these slippery sonsofbitches, we caught 'em with our bare hands."
We slid those monsters on our stringers and walked the long way home so everybody in the neighborhood would see us. We were legends that night. The next day I went out and bought a Heddon Tiny Torpedo. I never caught a thing with it, but it was the start of me figuring out how to tell a good goddamn story. And I gotta admit the fish get bigger every time I tell this one.
Keep your dukes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4h8xpz-BR0