River Report: Feeling Good

Jeremiah has been bugging me about getting to the river behind our house. He's been thinking it's low enough now to fish. So we went to check it out.

We tried to keep out of sight off the neighbor's land, and looked for some new access points. We slid in here but it was deep and had a silty bottom. So we did what we had to do.

We ducked hiked across the neighbor's land upstream to the access I've used since we moved in. It's a nice spot with a solid gravel bottom.

It also has a nice little run along the bank where the current has dug out a deep trough. Jeremiah thinks it would make a great swimming hole, and it would. But now we fished it, and I hooked the first fish on this stretch: a perfect 5 inch specimen of a smallmouth bass. That gave us hope, and Jeremiah came over to try his luck.

His new reel can cast a lure forever, and he tends to favor the long cast, so somehow he cast his lure right into that big tree. He went over to look for it and got distracted by the soft and diggable sand. While he was busy with that I moved back over and fished on down the run.

Right next to Jeremiah I had a strong take and caught a decent smallie.

Jeremiah found his lure and came back and gave it a shot, but didn't catch anything. Meanwhile I was seeing how far out into the current I could get. It turned out to be not very far. The flow is still very fast and strong.

If we were ospreys we could have gotten to the island. But that will have to wait until the water goes down a little more.

I climbed the bank.

Jeremiah joined me.

We started for home, but on the way Jeremiah went down the bank and waded in again. It got deep fast there, but there is a long, deep eddy downstream that seemed well worth exploring.

Jeremiah got a bump on his first cast, so he actually concentrated for about 5 minutes. Then he figured he wasn't going to catch anything after all, so he started messing around a bit. He cast way out, then began setting the hook on nothing--yanking it hard--over and over again. And wouldn't you know it, there was a smallmouth out there that couldn't resist that, and Jeremiah suddenly set on a fish. That was a fun moment, and he had a great time cranking that fish in. He swung it over and up onto the bank, and just as he was reaching for it, it jumped off the hook and was gone.

I told him he could count it, but he said no. He has an ethic, and he sticks to it: it's not a catch if you don't hold it in your hand.

So he went back to digging, and I fished.

And once again I caught a scrappy little smallie.

By then we were hungry and thirsty, and there was chicken on the grill back at the house, so we climbed the bank and headed for home through the field deep in summer.

Jeremiah could have been upset and frustrated, but he wasn't. He was in a great mood.

His brother even noticed it, and asked me, "What did he do, catch a fish?" I realized then that Jeremiah is growing into a real fisherman. It seems he's discovered what all true fishermen know: you don't have to catch a fish to feel good because you already feel so good just to be fishing.