Fishing wisdom says there's not much point trying to catch fish mid-afternoon when the sun's high in the sky, it's roastingly hot at 106* and the fish are stunned into stasis by the heat. They just lay there, suspended in a kind of piscine daze, not biting.
So don't bother fishing in these conditions, runs the wisdom, it's about as pointless as trying to get Anderson Cooper into conversion therapy.
Moral Arbiter
All this ran through my mind as I loaded up the rig and headed for water. Why am I doing this, I wondered. Because I had to get out and tilt my lance at fishing wisdom, I wanted to catch fish against the odds.
A challenge, sort of thing. Not unlike trying to convince a Democrat that peace with Russia isn't treason, or even Pearl Harbor cubed.
A Perch
Whatever. By some miracle of modern technology I reached the lake without the truck melting into the asphalt and surveyed the scene. No one was there and who can blame them? They didn't want to be baked into an early Brennanlike senescence.
Undaunted, I cast off with a split shot, small hook worm rig and was getting bites from the get-go, but couldn't close the deal. Small perch were obviously on the scene so I switched out the hook for something even smaller, miraculously the mono didn't ignite, and result, caught 5 perch.
Striper!
They weren't large and the last was perhaps the smallest. Put him to work! I thought, like Trump trying to cure our urban hellhole inner cities. Still, I wasn't counting on anything, it was the last cast. But what a cast.
After a minute or two, the mouth-hooked perch seemed to get vigorous in the water and I loosened the drag, instinctively. Good intuition because the line started playing out like fury, a fish was on as opposed to the perch playing around. So tighten it up, set the hook and reel it in.
Eye of the Beholder
And out came a voracious Striper who'd pretty much swallowed the perch whole. He went back to fight again another day and I went back to the Compound in the searing heat of the afternoon.
Reward. The Compound's Finally Getting Painted...
Moral of the story? Hungry Stripers, don't say Stormy, will eat pretty much anything.
Tight lines,
LSP
