Catching a Buzz in April

When I first joined a bass club in 1995, there was a guy named Steve who kindly invited me to fish with him quite often. Steve only had three, or maybe four, places that he ever fished. One of them was a particular bank that holds fish year-round if you can get to it through the matted grass, but it’s typically only really good for about a two-week period in April. I’ve also usually done best there when the tide is relatively high, either incoming or outgoing. 

I launched last Friday an hour after high tide and headed straight that way, and true to form the bass were chewing a Chatterbait. The grass was higher than it is most years at this time, but as long as the water was up my Chatterbait could ride above it or through it. For a few hours, I just went back and forth on this 75-yard stretch and continued to catch fish. It was so good in brief spurts that at one point a fish boiled essentially at boatside and I reflexively pitched my lure a rod’s length away and immediately hooked up. That doesn’t happen on most days.

But eventually, the tide got out, and it became harder to get the boat around, but more significantly harder to plow the grass with my Chatterbait. The bites got to be fewer, less committed, and from smaller fish. Around 10 o’clock, I was thinking of moving. And then I looked down at my temperature gauge and saw that the water was in the mid-60s. It wasn’t slick calm, but it was hardly rough, and with overcast skies, it just seemed perfect for buzzbait. Oddly enough, in nearly three decades of fishing the Potomac, I’m not sure that I’ve thrown a buzzbait in April. I’ve written dozens of articles with anglers far more knowledgeable than myself extolling the virtues of the buzzer after the water temp reaches 50. You may not get a lot of bites, they’ve told me, but they’ll be some of the biggest of the year. For some reason, I didn’t generally tie one on until mid-May.

What, except my own stubbornness and rigidity, prevented me from throwing one?

Fortunately, I had them in the boat.

Within three casts, I had a 12-incher in the boat. Little fish don’t necessarily prove anything. Sometimes they’re liars. The 5-pounder around the corner made me a believer, though. She flushed it perfectly. Over my remaining time, before I had to head home to work, I caught maybe seven or eight more, enough to turn a really good day into one of the best I’ve ever had on the Potomac.

And it was all because something inspired me to take my long-term blinders off.

I suspect it had something to do with the fact that it was the second day of Rick Clunn’s 500^th tournament with BASS. Clunn has always extolled the virtues of an open fishing mind. When I rode with him at the Pittsburgh Classic in 2005, he talked about how we reflexively categorize spots as “good” or “bad” and then never evaluate or reevaluate why we did so.

It might also have had something to do with riding with Kyle Patrick – 50 years Clunn’s junior – on the final practice day before this year’s Classic. He repeatedly stopped, got bit, and shook fish off on what looked like the worst possible banks in his key areas. They were places that no right-minded angler would’ve considered fishing, except that they led the first-timer to a 7th-place finish.

It's a good reminder to me to at least make the attempt to look at old places with fresh eyes and to look at new places without immediately judging them. It changes my opinion of April on the river and hopefully will lead me to productively reevaluate my existing prejudices and occasionally mistaken beliefs.