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"A Dream Fish"
By Fred Schwab
Having experienced the thrill of breaking fifty and believing that some readers will find the details of interest I humbly take this opportunity to relive that moment. It was the Thanksgiving morning of 11/23/83 and it would be my last fish for that year. Nineteen eighty three was not one of my better years because of a late start in my fishing efforts, in fact, I didn’t get into a groove until the last half of October. I did not fish at all until June and then only once. During July I fished on just 5 dates, taking just two weakfish, and both my effort and results were far below normal during both August and September.
The night of 11/22 was bright; the full moon had been on the 20th. It was relatively warm,…high 40’s with a barely detectable northwest wind. High water was a bit after 9:00 pm, and I began fishing at about two hours into the outgoing tide. There were no signs of fish but I was encouraged by the fact that pods of bunker kept moving through. There were no flushes or breaks but one can never be certain about what may be under the next passing school! At about 1:15 am I was just starting to crank the lure in from down current when it was stopped dead in the water, the fish hesitated for a moment and then took off. She had smacked that lure in 4 feet of water, directly down current about 25 feet from where I was standing.
She took a series of runs and at one point I estimated her to be roughly 200 feet down and out. I was tempted to tighten the drag a bit but experience had taught me that doing so on a big fish was a no no. Cupping the spool was a far wiser course of action. Eventually she slowed, turned, and as big fish sometimes do, she headed in toward the shallows where she exploded on top. That ended my speculation about whether she was a really big bass or an extremely energetic one in the thirties and perhaps foul hooked.
At this point I was making no progress and began moving down current but fortunately she headed back out into deeper water and slightly up current towards me. For the next 8 to 10 minutes it was pump and reel in between short, but powerful runs. I already knew she was big but when I got her into shallow water and saw the moonlight reflecting off her back I felt a rush throughout my body and my legs got wobbly, except for the mount of Bob Rochetta’s 76 pounder this was easily the largest bass I’d ever seen. During the previous three weeks I’d beached 3 fish in the thirties and during the prior year one of 47 pounds, so it wasn’t a case of not having seen a large bass over a long period of time,……she dwarfed those fish.
Two emotions take over when you get a big fish close to the beach, one is the excitement of seeing it’s bulk and the other is near panic that in those final and critical moments the hook will pull out or you will do something stupid. You want to beach the fish but you have to keep from horsing it in! She was hooked cleanly in the thick of the lip and hook removal was quick. All dimensions – girth, length, the spread of her tail, were impressive and I had nothing but the rod to measure her with. I knew that I’d release her, for a trophy was a poor tradeoff for her life. A wall mount was no longer a goal in my life and I’d reached the point in my fishing career where impressing others had no meaning. But perhaps most of all, by 1983 the future of the bass fishery was in serious doubt, how could I kill such a beautiful specimen of the species which many of us had fought so hard to save from oblivion!
In fear of causing her injury I hesitated weighing her, but I had to be certain. To do so I had to lift the chatillion at arms length, over my head in order to get the tail off the beach. That made it difficult to read the scale until I realized that it was pointless since it bottomed out. I measured her length with the fishing rod and made a legible scratch in it, but afterward I couldn’t be certain which scratch it was. I’d been nursing a bad back for quite some time and the weighing process made it worse, so rather than lifting her I got her back in the water by turning her and dragging her the few feet into the water. Once there, the resuscitation of the fish occurred quickly, she gave a mighty kick to her tail and was off, my face was soaked and the forceful kick of her tail left me with a sore wrist for several days. The only regret that I have over that release is that I will never know how much she weighed and because of her massive girth and the width of her body at the base, or wrist of her tail even a guess “could” be 5 or even 10 pounds below reality. Since that day I’ve seen one 50 plus and at lease four forties beached and none of them came close to her size. In fact, it was seeing those fish which caused my estimate of her true weight to change from 57 to 62, to at least 65 pounds.
Adopted from a book "The Complete History of the High Hill Striper Club " by Fred Schwab