(For about ten days it has been raining just enough each day to crush all hopes of fishing. I am slowly going nuts, so please forgive this string of posts as I try to hang on to what shreds of my sanity remain.)

A couple of years ago, if I remember correctly, someone asked on the board why bass fishermen occasionally cruise in, cut the engine, loudly bang on their boats with a paddle, and then start fishing. I think the answer someone gave was that the goal was to get the bass moving, get them out of their comfy hiding places, after which they would be more easily caught.

Last February I was experimenting tying some flies that were a lot larger than what I had tied before. To see how they cast, I put on my heavy coat, hat, and gloves and trotted over to the stream, which is about 150 feet across and consistently about three or four feet deep. A snag fisherman sometimes fishes there for carp, even in the winter, and he was there on the other side. As I was setting up, his wife and two teenaged sons brought him his lunch, and as I was about to start casting, his family suddenly started throwing large rocks into the water. Boys do that, but a wife? Then I saw the husband pointing to places, directing the barrage. Obviously, it was all to get the carp out of their hiding places.

The stream often freezes over, but it had been a little above freezing for over a week, which was the reason I was able to test cast my flies. With no chance of catching a bass (largemouth), I couldn?t have cared less about all the commotion with the rocks. Then the bass hit. Not much fighting spirit, but I measured it and the length converted to a little over 1-1/2 pounds. Being that it was cold and windy and I was just seeing how the flies cast, I was retrieving them as fast as I could, which is solidly wrong for cold weather bass. Looking back, of course, I wish I had gone and got my thermometer, but it was just too damn cold.

The fly, by the way, was an eight-inch lead-headed yellow bunny eel. It needed an 8-wt. outfit and maximum effort to go 35 feet, plus at times it required some seriously agile ducking. (Hey, we all make a few stupid flies at times. At least I hope I?m not the only one.) Never even got another hit on that fly. Which is to the good. My idea of hell would have been for it to have become my most effective fly.