Post hoc fish

It had been a long week. Nothing particularly bad happened but nothing particularly good either. Just a long week of being cordial and polite when you really feel like one of those Buddhist monks in the 60's. You know the ones who set themselves on fire. In other words a typical work week.
But it was friday and the yak was loaded in the truck along with a bit of tackle. Out the door exactly when my time was up and straight to the river. Which looked perfect. Low and clear with decent air temps and low humidity. Maybe it was a good thing I hadn't burned myself up in the middle of the shop floor after all.
Destination was a series of potholes and riffles that straddled the river in a long diagonal. There's one spot out in the middle that's waist deep and really fast but with the help of a good stick it's no problem to wade the whole river here.
Lot's of little slots and runs of fast water too. Perfect water for late summer.
And the fish cooperated as well. Hitting a fat electric blue grub I'd confiscated from Vic for helping out at a tackle show back in the winter. The best fish was a "short" 19 1/4. By short I mean she was fat as a bluegill and fought like an even bigger fish. I was very very happy with her. Then five minutes later a fish at least as big hammered the grub but then spit it back at me on about the third jump. As evening approached I thought I'd try a buzzbait which led to one of the strangest catches I've ever made. I'm retrieving the buzzbait as slow as I can and still keep it on top when a big fish comes up and wallops it and takes off like a freight train. It didn't take long to decide this isn't a smallmouth. So I'm thinking a big channel has probably hit the buzzbait since I've caught a couple on top over the years. But no, it ended up being a carp. A carp. On a buzzbait. On a buzzbait it came up and hammered on top. Go figure.
After that bit of strangeness I caught a couple more smallies on the buzzbait including a couple in the 17 inch range. But they didn't seem to be hitting it as well as they had been the grub so I tied that back on and on the first cast in an eddy right next to the deep fast water out in the middle a heavy fish took. Slow and steady and powerful it didn't act like a channel or a carp but instead ended up being what I'd thought it might be after those powerful runs, a nice shovelhead. On light smallmouth tackle a nice shovelhead will give you just about all you can handle.
I ended up with a couple dozen nice smallmouth with maybe three or four that would go 17, the topwater carp and the shovelhead. And saw five deer and zero people, just the way we like it...