The snake, the shiner, and the lesson

I'll call it Buford Creek. It's real name is something completely different. But it is one of my favorite places in the world and I try not to let everyone know where it is. It makes me nervous enough that its right there on the map already for everyone to see. Anyways it's not really the creek itself thats the hotspot. Rather it's what the creek does where it empties into the Little Miami River that creates the semi secret spot. From what I can gather, around 14,000 years ago the last Ice age ended in Ohio. Huge torrents of meltwater cut the steep valleys of the Little Miami. This melting ice also created Buford Creek. So nowadays Buford Creek is a steep narrow gorge that really dumps a deluge into the LMR during violent storms. In quiet weather the creek is just about dry. Along with a flood of water Buford Creek also dumps hundreds of tons of rocks over the decades into the Little Miami, creating a big rock bar and riffle and pushing a bend into the Little Miami. This bend causes the river to cut into the far bank and forming a nice deep run and hole. To get to this spot you park out on the road the parallels the river and walk down the dry or at least almost so bed of Buford Creek to get to the river. It's here in this last bit of creek just before it empties into the river that years ago I had an epiphany that forever changed the way I fished. I was young then, and dumb, even though I thought I knew everything. I'd by then learned that if I circled enough farm ponds throwing a quarter ounce spinnerbait I could catch a lot of largemouth bass and I thought I was quite the fisherman. Well it was midsummer and hot. Too hot to try the farm ponds I'd been fishing during the day at least. So mostly to kill some time till evening I decided to fish the mouth of Buford Creek. I was walking down the creek, carrying my new shiny shimano rod with the cardinal reel held in place with electrical tape just like the pros in bassmaster did. Then there in front of me I could see a minnow above the water of a tiny pool. From my vantage point it looked to be hovering a few inches above the water flopping its tail feebly. I crept closer and then sat down to watch. From my new, closer look I could tell that it was a rather large minnow held aloft by a rather small snake. When the snake held the minnow aloft he held the advantage but every time he lowered the minnow it would pull the little snake frantically around in a circle as the snake spun to keep its grip. Slowly the minnow weakened till the snake was able to coil around it and began to work the minnow down its mouth. As I sat there I could see something else flash in the pool. The water was so clear it was hard to tell where the edge of the tiny pool was. There in the pool was another minnow. I'm not sure if it was injured by the snake or just sucumbing to the heat and the stress, but it was having a bad time of it. It would slowly swim along upright then list over to one side and slowly rise up towards the surface slowly beating its tail. Then the poor guy would struggle back down but only for a foot or two till it would stop exhausted and then would slowly float back up only to repeat the whole thing again in a slow dance of death. I had just read Homer Circle in Field and Stream and was struck by just how much the dying minnow looked like Homer's description of how to fish what he called a slim minnow plug. Finally feeling like I was ready to sucumb to the heat myself I decided to head to the river. I knelt beside the dying fish and slipped my hat underneath and then raised it catching the helpless minnow in a capfull of water. I quickly walked the ten yards or so down to the river and waded in to midthigh. I lowered my hat into the water and freed the hapless minnow. It floated almost lifeless on the waters surface slowly working its fins as it floated downstream into the heart of the hole. When it was roughly fifteen feet away it beat its tail a few times diving weakly before floating back up. In the clear water I could see it coming, a big smallmouth, bigger than any I'd ever seen up till that time. It coasted up under the minnow and hung there. The minnow struggled weakly. Then the bass flared its gills and the minnow just disappeared. I waded as quietly as I could back to shore and began to search thru my tackle box. It was a flat sided Plano tackle box, one of the first I'd seen and I was awfully proud of it. The box was stuffed full of things I'd bought and had been given to me by my dad. Mostly largemouth lures like big plastic worms and buzzbaits. There in a crowded compartment along with two big crazy crawlers was a little gold and black rapala dad had given me. It was too small to fish with the baitcasting rod I'd been throwing spinnerbaits with and I'd never used it. But this new spinning rod would throw it. I tied on the rapala and began covering the pool with it. Fast. Too fast just covering water like I had with my spinnerbaits. I began to sweat. I stopped wiping the sweat out of my eyes as the rapala floated out there. I guess in the perfect story this is where a bass would of nail it. Instead it floated back over some sunken brush. I slowly began pulling the lure back trying not to get it to swim too deep. Thats when the lightbulb went off. I'd been hit over the head with it, first by Homer Circle and then given a demo by the dying minnow but like I said I was young and knew everything. The next cast and I let the minnow sit there a minute then twitched it and then reel a bit and let it float back up and twitched it again. After four or five feet of this a smallmouth of about a pound exploded on my rapala. And as they say the rest is history. All thru the bend pool and the run below a dozen smallmouth fell victim to the little floating rapala. Last night while poking around my bookshelf looking for something to read on a winter night I found Homer Circle's old book Bass Wisdom and the memory of that day all those years ago came flooding back. Its funny how you can forget where you left the car keys this morning but remember every detail of a fishing trip thirty years before...