Springtime like holiday for every type of angler

For anglers, the next two months are like extended versions of Christmas.

We can catch all the fish we love to catch any way we like to catch them, with any lure we want to throw at them.

Tyrone Phillips of Little Rock recently competed in a bass tournament at Lake Ouachita. He said the water was about 49 degrees. He did well fishing jigs slowly on the bottom. Other anglers caught limits with Alabama rigs. That’s an effective way to catch fish this time of year, but it will wear you out. An Alabama rig is heavy and unwieldy. Heaving it for a day with a rod built like a pool cue is a full body workout.

Bass fishing has been very good on Lake Dardanelle for anglers throwing swimbaits and crankbaits.

In north Arkansas, on Beaver and Bull Shoals lakes, the jerkbait bite is ascendant and will continue to be good into early May.

At the same time, striped bass will be hitting topwaters as well. That’s always an awakening when you’re walking a Zara Spook with a medium-action rod among schooling largemouths and a 20-pound striper inhales the lure. It sounds like a loud slurp. Like magic, the lure is gone. Haul back on the rod to see what’s in the package.

If it’s a striper, you’d better adjust your drag because you’re about to go for a ride. A force of immense power surges deep, stripping line off your reel with a wheezy whine. If it’s a small fish, 1012 pounds, you will subdue it fairly quickly. A 20-pounder or better won’t give up as easily. If it hit an ordinary jerkbait, you will probably feel the treble hooks slowly come unbuttoned as the striper straightens the prongs one by one. It’s a sick, helpless feeling to know you’ve probably got at best 4-5 prongs imbedded. There goes one. There goes another. And another. It’s a race to get the fish to the net before it finally pulls loose.

I’ve had a few epic striper fights. The first was on the Ouachita River below Remmel Dam fishing with Mark Roberts. We were fishing for walleye before dawn. I used an Eagle Claw Featherlite rod and a Shimano GT-51 ultralight baitcasting reel with 6-pound test line. The rod was as slim and as limber as a buggy whip, and the reel looked more appropriate for a crappie rig.

I cast a Bomber stickbait a short distance, but this fish didn’t slurp the lure. It smashed it with a massive splash.

The fish had nowhere to run, and there was no cover on the bottom to foul my line. I worked the drag and let the fish fight itself out. It weighed 14 pounds, which at that time was my biggest. I was proud to land it on that delicate little rig. The fish straightened four of the six treble prongs. Another five minutes would have done me in.

My next best was on the Ouachita River at a place called Striper Corner, again with Mark Roberts. Roberts’s boat was beached on a gravel bar as we tended to some tackle malfunctions. Again I had the ultralight baitcasting rig. I cast out a jerkbait that sat still on the water as I untangled a backlash. I had just untangled the last snag, thank goodness, when the lure vanished in a slurp.

Again, the fish had nowhere to go. Roberts fired up his jet drive motor, and we followed the fish all over the river until it ran out of steam. That one weighed 19 pounds. It was meaningful to me because I had just begun treatment for cancer, and I was battling a severe case of pneumonia. That was so much fun that it redoubled my determination to get well.

Best of all was the striper I hooked on the upper Ouachita River a few years ago while fishing with Chris Larson. We were trolling stickbaits for walleyes on a bright, cool March afternoon when a striper jumped on the lure. The rod and reel were bigger, but the line was still only 6-pound test. I fought that fish for 50 minutes down three pools and two sets of rapids.

When I got it to the boat, it was too big for Larson’s giant net. We estimated it to be in the 50-pound neighborhood. It surged one last time and broke the line.

As you might have noticed, I really like fishing with jerkbaits.