It’s 4am, I’ve just been woken up by my cat smacking my spectacles off my bedside table. As I sit up in bed and look outside the window, my mind starts to wander. Who is awake at this time of day? The baker perhaps or the cyclists? Boom, I hear the newspaper being thrown over the front gate. Why is that lady delivering the newspaper at 4am in the morning!? Why would anyone choose to be functioning at this hour of the day!? And then I ask myself the question, what is it that drives and motivates me about bassing that allows me to wake at this hour with a smile on my face? Surely no other group of people in the world feel this way about their sport?
And so the thoughts continue, and I start a little imaginary fishing outing in my head. The room is now quiet ( I threw a pillow at the cat and he left the room ) so I close my eyes and my mind begins to drift away into a world of glassy, undisturbed waters somewhere in a distant land.
Running through a list of my more well-known fishing spots, I start to feel a slight sense of panic at who might also be there? How many boats and people will already be on the water? Our sport is growing daily and I fear that as small a scene as we believe we have, things are starting to change. What was once a best kept secret is now perhaps common knowledge thanks to the whole broken telephone ‘he said, she said’ disease that seems to sometimes run rife amongst the bass fishing community.
My panic soon turns to a calm sense of relief as I fondly recall one of my very first bass fishing excursions. Two close buddies took me to a dam up in the mountains passed Franshoek in the Western Cape. I remember my car getting stuck on a dirt road and the 3 of us having to hike through thorny bushes to get to the dam. (We would obviously only worry about the car when we returned! ) I remember the fishing being terrible and not much action being had at all. The fun part of the
PLAYING THE FIELD
You won’t know if you don’t go!
Bass Digest/June, 2014