up and at em...

The alarm jangled me awake at 4 am. For a moment I debated just rolling back over but I managed to drag myself out the door. In the last five or six days I've caught a couple nice shovels and some big channels while out smallie fishing and the time seemed ripe to try and catch one on purpose. I'd bought an Okuma Baitrunner that I kept filled with braid on a big rod for distance at places like the Big O or down in Tenn. Last night I'd taken it off that rod and put it on a seven foot carrot stix heavy action bass rod which weighed next to nothing and would be much more pleasant to cast. I had a tupperware container in the knapsack filled with oversize lipless cranks and jumbo curly shads. At the river I tied on a 3/8 ounce jighead and threaded on a huge 5" curly shad and let fly with my sophistry of soft plastic. Wow.. I could cast that thing halfway across the GMR. On one slow steady retrieve I felt a solid thump and set hard. The rod bent double as a good fish bore off downstream. Then for some reason it turned and ran right at me. I'm reeling like a madman trying to stay tight to the fish as it charged like the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Then at like ten feet it turned and the rod bent double again. But now the fish was in wide open river and in a few minutes I knelt down and grabbed that big lower jaw. 37" Wow that was fun, I'm going to have to do that a few more times while the waters still warm...