Catching a big trophy bass is a bucket-list sort of thing for millions of anglers. In my opinion a ten-pounder qualifies. One that big could eat a chiwawa.
The St. Johns River near my home in DeLand regularly produces ten pounders, and a man from Alabama caught one twelve pounds last week using a live Florida shiner for bait.
A house guest of mine saw the bass in a newspaper photo and told me that he’d bass fished his entire adult life—he’s about seventy five years old— and had always dreamed of catching a “wall-hanger, a 10 pounder.”
He’s not in the best of health, and I’m not getting any younger, and I owe him a million favors, so I called the #1 guide nearby and asked about going fishing with him in the next couple of days. As luck would have it, he did have an opening for a half-day charter due to a cancellation. Tomorrow would be fine.
I’d seen the guide’s bass boat. It has a bunch of fancy logos. He has a website that makes him sound like a combination of Jimmy Carter and Tom Brady. He’s good.
I asked, trying to sound casual, “How much do you charge?” He replied, also casual, “$300 a half-day and you pay for the shiners.”
“Oh,” I said, “how much are Florida shiners?”
He said, “$20 a dozen. We might use four, five dozen.” Yikes! Maybe $400 for a four hour trip, plus tip. BUT…imagine having that many bites!
I’d stepped in it and couldn’t really justify the cost. It was waay too expensive, as my wife would explain to me, but maybe my friend would offer to do what’s called, “picking up the tip,” while I paid the $300 plus bait cost.
My wife realized that I’d be fishing also, and that maybe by using a guide I “would actually catch one.” She seemed puzzled, aggravated might be a better word, that I was hiring a guide to go fishing.
The next day I felt a little like I was riding on a parade float in his boat. A man with some sort of sales background, he opened a cooler and showed us “all the waters you want, a couple of cokes.” And, he had nice new tackle.
There were plenty of live native shiners in a well— some “nice ones” five to seven inches and a couple of floaters and a few semi-stunned twirlers. Farm-raised Minis are under four inches. Giants nearly a foot long look good in the live well and give touron bassers something to marvel about.
After a short, fast ride we chugged into a gorgeous shallow bay behind some oak trees hanging over the water, surrounded by hyacinths and lily pads, just off the main St. Johns channel near Astor, Florida. I looked carefully to see what made the “hotspot” our guide had found different from a million others within a half mile of where we sat, power-pole anchored into three feet of water over loose mud. Having a few corks hanging from overhanging tree limbs took away from the wilderness feel, and the first bass we landed after an hour’s fishing had a hook deeply imbedded in his throat, which would also seem to indicate that a few boats might have noticed our guide’s “hotspot” and fished the area often. That small bass did not survive the super-set my friend gave him when he tried to swim away with the $1.66 shiner. The bass went through the air at great speed and hit the side of the 200 hp. Mercury outboard with a whapping sound.
5/0 Eagle Claw weedless hooks made it easier for the guide—less grass and water junk on the hook— and probably kept our shiners alive longer. Hooked under its chin, he’d lob the shiner into position. Fished three feet under a 2” foam cork with no leader, the bait swims around pulling 50 lb. braided line on a bait-runner spinning reel. When it gets nervous it swims anxiously, feeling the nearby presence of a bass or mudfish or a catfish or gar or alligator or a cormorant or large seagull, all of which combine to run up your bill when they kill a shiner.
When you get a strike you wait until exactly the right instant, which is announced by the guide. Then you strike hard. No, harder than that, and reel like crazy.
After a while we moved a mile or so to another spot that looked bassy but yielded only two fish, one approaching three pounds. Total catch around five pounds. The good news was that we only had a $30 shiner bill.