OUTDOORS
Since returning from the Rio Grande Valley where my wife Beth and I spent the winter, I have done most of my fishing with a fly rod. I prefer fly-fishing above all other types of fishing. But I am not a purist. I will pick up a spinning rod rigged with a plastic worm.
Most of my fishing recently has been on Bastrop Lake, Dunlap Lake [near New Braunfels] and the San Marcos River.
Local fishing legend Bobby Whiteside and I fished for bream twice on Lake Dunlap. Bobby will not use a flyrod. Years ago, I bought him a nice 3-weight flyrod. I think he has used it once.
I caught most of the bream, which wasn’t many, on my flyrod.
Then Mike Schlimgen and I fished Bastrop with bass poppers on fly rods. It was a banner day with a thunderstorm full of hail approaching. The bass literally ate up those poppers. We caught 30 fish before the storm ran us off the lake. As Mike was pulling in the boat up the ramp, with me still in the boat, hail and rain began to pelt me. We should have quit two minutes sooner.
The following week, Mike and I returned to Bastrop, but the bass bite was slow. But to our surprise, we found a bed of spawning bream. Big red-ears and red-ear-blue gill hybrids ate our small poppers. When business slowed down on the poppers, Mike switched to a small pink slow-sinking spider. The fish went wild for the spider. I called it the Pink Panther. Mike tied me a couple of pinks when we got home.
A few days later, I took an old friend Robert Mc-Millan to Bastrop. Robert loves to fly-fish. To my surprise, the bream were in the exact same spot. After the surface bite on the poppers slowed, I put on the Pink Panther. The pond is all catch and release so those fish are still there.
Then I had a brainstorm. My neighbor Tom Ray has cancer. With a tumor in his spine, he is totally crippled and confined to a wheelchair. I can’t get him into my boat.
Could I take him to the pond, position his wheelchair so he could cast and help him catch bass? Maybe so.
Right before Tom was confined to the wheelchair, we fished at the coast together almost exactly a year ago. I wondered if we would ever fish again.
I got permission from the owner of the tank and took Tom last week, in his handicap van, to the ranch.
After positioning Tom as near to the water as possible, Tom began trying to cast the flyrod. I caught a large bullgill and a nice bass on my fly rod, but I saw it wasn’t going to work for Tom. He couldn’t reach the deeper water from this wheelchair.
So we went with Plan B. A spinning rig with a plas- tic worm was no problem for him to cast. A year’s layoff didn’t seem to affect Tom. He hadn’t lost his bass fishing touch. He was soon catching more bass than me. He was excited. When you haven’t felt the tug of your line in over a year, you have to be happy.
I didn’t want to tire Tom out, so we quit at 8:30 A.M. Tom caught seven bass. He just dragged them up the bank, unhooked the fish and tossed them back to bite another day.
Seeing him catch some fish was much more fulfilling to me than if I had caught those fish.
