Dennis Whiteside, my long-time friend whom I have hunted and fished with since our college days, sent me a message about ten days ago. It went on and on about how good the fishing was about to become, as he envisioned heavy-bodied, tail-walking bass trying to throw a top-water lure. It is indeed topwater time if you can stand the heat.

On the same day he had a pair of smallmouth fishermen wearing themselves out down in north Arkansas landing big smallmouth on buzz baits and surface poppers, I floated down the lower stretches of a Missouri stream using topwater lures too. And I lost one of the best double-bladed buzz-baits I have, when a huge largemouth bass took it from the surface. I think he came up from beneath a rock bluff in water that was 8 or 10 feet deep.

I don’t know for sure how big he was, but I saw him very well, and I thought I had him whipped. When you are using casting gear and fourteen-pound line, you don’t expect to have a bass break off, but I was too impatient, and when I got him next to my boat, he made a mighty lunge and he was just too close for my drag to work properly. He was a beauty of a largemouth, wide and green, maybe seven and a half pounds, but at least six. Maybe there was a nick in my line. Who knows… he took my buzz spin and splashed water in my face. It is a humiliating thing for a grizzled old veteran outdoorsman to endure.

I tied on another buzz-spin, this time a black one, with only one big blade. It was getting dark, and I decided I would fish another fifteen minutes and go in. I was pretty doggone dejected.

Casting the opposite bank, where the water is shallower, and there were several big logs… I was thinking about how I never seem to land the big ones, and feeling sorry for myself. Suddenly there was a flash of white above a log, a commotion on the surface where my bladed bait was limping along, making bubble tracks on the surface, and it was gone.

You spend all your time fishing a topwater lure, looking for that strike from a big fish and it always seems to come when you least expect it, when you are thinking where you might ought to make your next cast. And right then, in the edge of the evening, while I was expecting it the least, one of the half dozen biggest bass I have ever caught clobbered that buzz-spin with the ferocity of a wolf taking down a young deer. I knew there’d better not be a weak place in the line again, because I had to tighten the drag on my old Ambassadeur reel in order to get that bass out of those logs.

The old bass knew what to do, and I had to strain that rod hard to keep it from going down deep and hanging me up in that brushpile. When I got her out of that mess, there was open water between us, and she had no recourse but to try to throw the lure back at me by coming up out of the water, dancing on her tail.

You lose a lot of big bass when they come out of water and shake their head that way, well above the surface. When I saw that bass, my pulse jumped a little with her. I pulled her down as best I could and grabbed my net. And I tried to be patient, as she fought hard down deep, then came to the surface a second time.

The hook was solid in her lower jaw, and I was perhaps luckier than I was good. I lifted her high and marveled at that huge mouth and head. I think, that in the spring, when she would perhaps be better fed and full of eggs that bass would have maybe weighed nearly nine pounds. She was 24 inches long, and that’s huge for an Ozark river. While she was not my biggest bass, she was the biggest I have ever taken on a topwater lure. Her tail was chopped off on top and shaped like a hooked bottle opener, her lower jaw jutted out too far, and she didn’t have much of a body, much too thin and long. That happens when a bass gets old. She was kind of an old lady, but she could still dance. But truthfully I don’t believe the bass came from the river. She probably got there when a big private pond upstream had a dam break in the spring and a bunch of fish were emptied into the river from that seldom-fished pond.

Maybe next spring, she will still be there for another dance like the one last week. For sure, I will know her if I ever see her again.

Finally, my new book and my summer magazine have been finished and ready to mail. To get either one call 417-777-5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.