the best time of day: morning.

As these words are written to summarize yesterday’s events, I’m sitting in the airy dining room of our quiet cabin overlooking a mountain lake.  None of the other members of the “Menominee Wild Bunch” are awake yet and I’m dining on the traditional fisherman’s breakfast of cold pepperoni pizza and a diet soda.

Yesterday was the most eventful day.  The river gave up some fish but we paid a price in blood, literally.  It was combat fishing at its finest.

The morning started lazily as one of the crew was forced to lead a conference call for that silly concept we know as “work.”  He was forgiven for allowing responsibility to intrude upon our carefully-crafted fantasy world..  Fortunately the cabin had a working landline since cellular signals are scarce in these parts.

While Frank was suffering the slings and arrows of the real world, we went fishing in the lake below our cabin.  As a typical northwoods glacial lake, the water is gin-clear and full of bass and pike.

John served as guide, rowing our boat to an area across the lake where big pike and bass are known to be in residence.  Judging by the mounted fish on the walls of the cabin, like the men from Jaws, I was afraid we didn’t have enough boat.

I wasn’t targeting pike, but within a few casts, the pike had targeted me.  One moment I was reeling in a tube jig, the next moment the line went limp as if severed by a razor blade.

As we had just jumped into the boat on a whim, I had no spare tackle or rods so I borrowed John’s spare rod which had been rigged with a steel leader.

It turns out the pike in the lake HATE white spinners and in 45-minutes, I caught more pike than my cumulative life total up to that point.  It was a hoot.

Shortly around noon, Frank was done and we saddled up the boats.  Our destination was a little-known area called Pier’s Gorge, a series of rapids along the Menominee that is home to some serious Class IV whitewater and many hungry smallmouth bass.

We hiked into the gorge and took pictures then made our way upstream.  We began catching lots of smallmouth, albeit smaller fish than the past couple of days in the slower section of river.  However, the constant action was a nice change of pace over the better-quality-but-slower fishing of the past couple of days.

I was walking up the trail, leap-frogging the other fisherman when I noticed a huddle near our host John.  Just from the body language, I could tell there was a problem.

Making my way down to the sandbar, I could see the issue: John had a large hook embedded firmly in his cheek.  Not knowing John to be into extreme fashion, I figured that it was an accident.

As the growing masses of people offered helpful advice, we developed a game plan.  I would attempt the “line pull” method, wherein a loop of line is placed around the bend of the hook and, while the hook is pushed towards the skin, the line pulls the hook backward out of the same hole it entered.

After a deep breath on both part of surgeon and victim, er, patient, we pulled.  This proved less than optimal as I noticed it appeared John’s sideburns were being pulled off his face.
We stopped and regrouped.  It was apparent that we would have to use the old-fashioned method of pushing the hook through the skin, clipping the barb and pushing the shank back through.
This plan worked, but not until everyone had had a hearty vomit as John was forced to repeated push on the hook until it popped out of the skin.

We fished for four hours, catching all sorts of bass.  In one hole, our buddy Frank managed to pick up about 15 fishing on about 30 casts.  None of fish were huge but they more than made up for it with enthusiasm.

However, the river wasn’t so kind to the fisherman.  Frank fell and busted his knee and neck, while John (Captain Hook) fell down a cliff and ran another hook into his finger.

Literally bleeding and battered, we headed to another spot on the Menominee where we could use the boats.

After a half-hour drive down a sand road, we found the ramp.  So did an assemblage of profoundly drunken campers who had turned the remote ramp area into a campsite that resembled the slums of Calcutta, only more drunk.

The river her is fairly unremarkable until we ran up to Penbonwon falls.  Here the tea-colored river tumbles over a massive of Precambrian rock, blocking passage up or down stream for all but the most intrepid kayaker.  As bald eagles wheeled overhead, we caught heavy-shouldered smallmouth in the rapids.

Here I lost perhaps the nicest smallmouth bass of my life.  In a backwater, a huge smallie inhaled my swim bait, straining my drag and causing everyone in the boat to stop fishing to witness the fight.

In a few minutes, the fish was fighting in tight circles alongside the boat and another, unnamed fisherman attempted to use the net.  I say “attempted.”

So, the largest smallmouth bass of my life is still swimming in the rapids below PenBonWon falls.

I took it all in stride.  After all, we were alive, fishing in a beautiful semi-remote semi-wilderness area where the river runs wild and the fish still run free.  It was a great day to be alive, even if I did manage to defoliate several nearby pine trees with my language.

I could elaborate further but Day Four of fishing calls……