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August 24, 1999 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d The moonlight helped a little.<\/p>\n
I was having trouble seeing my line, let alone the tip of the fishing rod it was attached to.<\/p>\n
I hunkered down atop the boat and squinted out toward the waters of Lake Lanier, trying to see whether my line was slack or taut.<\/p>\n
LaVerne Headrick looked at me and laughed.<\/p>\n
“I see you’re starting to catch on to the trickiness of nighttime bass fishing,” he said. I assume he was smiling when he said this. I couldn’t tell. He was standing in the darkness of the front of the boat.<\/p>\n
Nighttime bass fishing is tricky \u00e2\u20ac\u201d especially if you’re not too good a fisherman in the daylight.<\/p>\n
But the 59-year-old Headrick, my teammate for the Tuesday Night Tournament last week, is one of Lanier’s best. And he taught me a thing or two … or three or four.<\/p>\n
Thus far, we had boated four spotted bass that met the 14-inch requirement, “derby fish” as Headrick calls them. Much to our surprise, we seemed well on our way to catching a five-fish limit before our 11 p.m. check-in time.<\/p>\n
Earlier, our prospects didn’t look so good.<\/p>\n
“If we get a bite, that’s a bonus,” Headrick said to me shortly after we set out. “Ain’t nobody catchin’ nothin’ lately. Right now the fish are under stress from the heat.”<\/p>\n
That wasn’t the case earlier this summer, when Headrick was “wearin’ ’em out.” In other words, he was catching a lot of fish. He and his partner Dale Long still sit atop the leaderboard for this season’s Browns Bridge Marine Friday Nite team tournament series, perhaps the largest of the dozens of derbies held on Lanier each year.<\/p>\n
At exactly 6:30 p.m., in groups of four and five, the Tuesday night anglers sped off from Laurel Park in their bass boats, each heading off to a different part of the lake.<\/p>\n
“We honor each other’s spots,” said Headrick, who in his 34 years of fishing Lanier has accumulated quite a few good ones. And we hit a lot of them Tuesday night. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. If the fish weren’t biting, we were off … and fast. Sometimes Headrick hits 20 or more spots in a night.<\/p>\n
“I don’t mess around,” said Headrick, who lives in Gainesville. “For a man my age, I get around pretty good.”<\/p>\n
There were 21 boats competing Tuesday night, a small enough number so I didn’t feel too intimidated heading into my first-ever bass tournament. My inexperience was apparent early on.<\/p>\n
“I’ll teach you to cast here in a minute,” Headrick said with a chuckle. Out of the corner of his eye he had been watching me struggle with the spinning rod for several minutes now.<\/p>\n
Headrick did teach me, and I guess he taught me well. My next one was a beauty.<\/p>\n
“Shoot, who says a Yankee can’t cast?” Headrick exclaimed, referring to my Pennsylvania roots.<\/p>\n
I told him there are many regions of Pennsylvania that don’t seem like Yankee country at all. I think it was James Carville who said Pennsylvania was Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. That’s not far from the truth \u00e2\u20ac\u201d only we talk funny up in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
With casting down, it was now time to catch some fish, which we did at stop No. 4.<\/p>\n
We were fishing with plastic worms, slowly dragging them around on the bottom, where the spotted bass feed.<\/p>\n
Headrick quickly caught two derby fish. It was becoming more and more obvious who the weak link in the boat was.<\/p>\n
“Let it go to the bottom,” he repeated to me. “You’re fishing above them. Let’s take a look at your worm.”<\/p>\n
I reeled in. Half of my worm was missing. Headrick looked at the worm, and back at me. He laughed.<\/p>\n
“Well, I didn’t feel a fish,” I said apologetically. “Maybe it wasn’t a fish.”<\/p>\n
“Nah, it wasn’t a fish, Dan,” he said sarcastically. “Maybe it’s somebody out there with a knife.”<\/p>\n
A true fisherman needs to be able to take some good-natured ribbing. We concluded I wasn’t being patient enough. I was reeling in too quickly.<\/p>\n
“See, you’re making two casts to my one,” Headrick said.<\/p>\n
“Well, I was going for the fast ones,” I joked.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, you don’t want no lethargic fish … Have you got a fish? Yeah, you’ve got one.”<\/p>\n
My rod tip was bending sharply downward.<\/p>\n
“Take your time. Wind slow. You’ve got a good one. Keep your rod tip bent,” Headrick instructed.<\/p>\n
Then it came into view and Headrick snatched it up with his net.<\/p>\n
“Hot dog! Look what my man done. All right! That’s a good ‘un,” he said. The fish weighed 2.22 pounds, a real “bull” spotted bass, Headrick said.<\/p>\n
“That’s how we do it up North,” I said.<\/p>\n
Less than an hour after Headrick caught our first one, I boated another keeper. It was still light out and we had four derby fish. To the surprise of both of us, we were in this thing. Our competitive juices were flowing.<\/p>\n
“OK, catch one, Dan, and then we’ll go huntin’ a big one, a largemouth, a kicker fish.”<\/p>\n
That was the plan. But it never happened.<\/p>\n
“To have any chance of winning, we’ve got to have one more fish,” Headrick said as the moon crept higher and higher into the nighttime sky.<\/p>\n
The sky turned pink. The crickets started to sing. The sky turned black. The stars came out. But no more fish. We had to head back.<\/p>\n
Our four fish weighed in at 6.63 pounds, good enough for third place and $63, certainly better than either Headrick or I had expected.<\/p>\n
As the fishermen socialized and packed up their equipment, I released our fish back into the lake and watched them swim away toward the darkness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
August 24, 1999 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d The moonlight helped a little. I was having trouble seeing my line, let alone the tip of the fishing rod it was attached to. I hunkered down atop the boat and squinted out toward the waters of Lake Lanier, trying to see whether my line was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}