The Best Bass

I went to Georgia on Saturday after my son’s soccer game. The Lagrange, Georgia fly community was putting on a fly fishing film festival. It was put on to raise money for the Flint and Chattahoochee River keepers.  My buddy Mega Dave was kind and brought me the saleable merchandise the evening before. He also was willing to take me out on the Flint River for shoal bass. As I had never fished for this species of bass it was really the only reason I was stoked for the trip.  We waded some shoals that were public access, and in the trough of the giant rock formations I rather quickly discovered why he and Scott Stevenson say the shoal bass is the greatest bass of all. I slung my popper out over a run and a bass inhaled it so deeply that it became hung to his gills. After a quick hemostat surgery the fly was extracted but a line of blood drizzled out the side of his sixteen inch frame. I dunked him in water to wash the sanguinary truculence from the shot, and with a quick flash of the tail he was gone without a trace and prior to the photo being snapped.  

I couldn’t really fathom getting another opportunity to document the health of the system, but I was wrong. After Mega Dave (so named for his love of the band Megadeth) and I worked our way down the shoals he fished a run for about an hour. Then I moved over to what I figured was his stale water, and to my great surprise a large shoal bass leaped from the darkness of a rapid run and engulfed my popper again. This time I hung him in the corner of his mouth. After hollering for Dave to get his camera ready he materialized from around the bend. The fish was about eighteen inches and had a beautiful dark melanin blotch on his side. We let the fish go and celebrated with high fives. 

We fished our way out and I enjoyed the morning immensely. Later my fatigue from the four hours of sleep set in. I took Mega Dave’s photo of me and savored it as a kind of payment for going and honoring the Flint River.  I’ll always have the photo of me with the greatest bass there is– the shoal bass.