Pond memories: Into the night, frog-fishing for bass

I parked by a street light in a commercial area to have a beacon when walking out Saturday night. Topwater-fishing for largemouth bass is worth stumbling around in the dark.

In two hours, an hour of twilight and an hour of dark, I went 6-for-19, better than the Mendoza line, but not great. Every blow-up, slurp or hook-up is same as an at-bat. My aim is hit .500. I rarely do.

But, in my world, fishing topwaters is special, especially in summer heat.

It was a special night, as was the spot.

In the final months of his life, Norm Minas shared several ponds in subdivisions and commercial areas, spots he had only shared with his son Zachary. The two ponds I fished Saturday Minas’ wife Tammy originally pulled up for me on Google Earth.

I can find special fishing spots. But compared to Minas, I’m what Lenyn Sosa is to Javier Baez.

I had two spinning rods with monofilament line, one with a ChatterBait, the other with a Pop-R, and a baitcaster with 20-pound braided line and a popper Scum Frog.

Even in the heat, I pulled on knee-high boots, as much for tick prevention as mucking around shore. They helped with wading through overgrown shoreline thistles, too.

The ponds were a quarter-mile hike across a fallow field in a commercial development. I had driven by the two ponds hundreds of times without knowing it, until Minas told me about them.

I raised a couple small bass without hooking, then a thunderstorm blew up directly overhead. Wondering how I offended Thor, I settled lower so the dwarf trees on shore were taller.

Finally,I hooked a bass on the ChatterBait, but there was too much aquatic plant growth to effectively run it or even think about the Pop-R, so I stuck with the Scum Frog, going 4-for-12 in the final hour of twilight.

Dale Bowman

I honed my frog-fishing under Art Frisell, counter man at Triangle Sports and Marine in Antioch, when we tournament fished together. I called for advice on improving my average.

“Quit,” was his first smart-ass crack, then he asked, ``Sharpening the hooks on that thing? Get a small file, something cheap. Run it parallel to the hook, which is so thick. Three or four swipes on each side, parallel, 11 and 1 on top.’’

Next time.

In the dark, I missed four in a row. All the same, night blow-ups are especially thrilling.

A decent bass missed my frog around 10 p.m.

“If you know you missed, leave it,” I remembered Frisell telling me.

I let the frog sit, then twitched it. Bam. Had the final fish of the night.

It was time.

I fixed on the parking light, trekking back in the dark across the fallow field.

WILD THINGS

• The Twitter account of Maggie Mae in the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac posted about “what we think was 6-8 foot sturgeon swimming on top of water. Crazy stuff out here.”
• Here’s my red-wing blackbird on red-tailed hawk tale. Driving (so no photos) over the weekend, I watched a red-wing divebombing the small feathers behind the tail on a red-tail. Repeatedly.

STRAY CAST

I remember when the National Baseball Hall of Fame was for the equivalent of 50-pound muskies