Write about what you know…” Why does this worn-out cliché about literary creation remind me of old Hemingway? Verification made, in Paris is a partyhe talks about his decision to write a story about everything he knows, specifying somewhere what he means by this word: [ce que] I really knew […] and who matters most to me. He knew about swordfish fishing and he wrote about swordfish fishing. And me, when writing about bass fishing, I find myself wondering if I really know anything about it, if I know Again something… On the other hand, the smallmouth bass is, without a doubt, the freshwater fish that means the most to me.
Perhaps because it has the gift of reminding me of the real holidays, those of adolescence before the jobs summer, all those weeks spent at the family chalet inventing the next day, dreaming of the big “pallets” waiting for us, lying in ambush even under the chalet’s wharf, where the little mouths came to spawn each spring. In our fevered imaginations, Micropterus dolomieuthis fish which, once hooked, panicked our reels by executing spectacular leaps out of the water and gave the impression of dancing at the end of our lines as it tried to spit out the hook, was, all things considered , which came closest to papa Hemingway’s swordfish.
We didn’t make life too complicated back then. A floating Rapala swung near the rocks half submerged and surrounded by beds of pebbles, even, with the impudence of our fifteen years, a few centimeters from the quays of the neighboring chalets, ensured most of the captures. The Jitterbug, a surface lure imitating a flabbering frog, and the Mepps spinners of the Black Fury type were also giving results. I saw one of my brothers pull out a three pound bass that he had stung with a fly the size of his little toe nail.
Later, when I passed by this little lake again and found the time to jump in a canoe to go swing the same good old golden Rapala over a rocky bottom, I happened to make a good catch. But this magic lure of my adolescence apparently left the fish of all the other lakes in Quebec indifferent. Too bad, because I fished more and more rarely, and the less I fished, the more I found myself incompetent. Fishing for bass is not like having sex or flying an F-18. The problem is not so much to lose the technique, it is rather the fact that the multiplication of techniques leads to a form of halieutic illiteracy, and I am weighing my words.
Trying to reconnect the thread that connects me to the bass beyond the decades therefore involved a serious upgrade. Even though I knew that the North American artificial lure industry relies in large part on the two species of bass that inhabit the waters of this continent, the debauchery of hook-bristling critters and the orgy of plastic and he other composite materials where you fall into a trap while surveying the fishing accessories department of any the slightest specialized shop still make you dizzy.
On the next line, will we use a jerk bait, a crank bait or a spinner bait? Plastic worm or synthetic minnow with an attractive smell? A crayfish from the Powerbait series, perhaps? And how to impale these treats? Texas or Carolina editing? On a leaded head or in “drop shot”? It depends on the days, the conditions, and also the fish, starting with the buyer himself.
Bass fishing resembles our consumer society. Faced with so many choices, such a fabulous offer, how could demand not follow? Doesn’t the evolution of desire in over-demanded fish explain the obsolescence of my Rapala?
My eight-year-old daughter is not mistaken when she treats the “scent-spreading sinking minnows” and other injured fish imitations in my tackle box like the playthings they are. I took her to a dam in the Magog and put a worm on her weighted hook to test the waters. I had seen ladies catch white perches which they called “white perches” at this place. An invasive species from the south via the Hudson and Lake Memphremagog.
My daughter, she immediately pulls out a panfish, then a small bass that unhooks itself and falls. We then see another, much bigger one, come prowling lazily around its worm under thirty centimeters of water, opening its mouth in circles to swallow it, then suddenly changing its mind and moving away…
No sooner have I slipped one of those scented minnow imitations that she likes on her hook than I see the end of her rod arch. I forgot to tell her to strike well, the bass having a hard mouth, and she drops a nice one. Then comes back to me this verse of Miron: “And I have bass couch grass full of the soul. “The quackgrass, explained the poet in The future cleared, “It’s hard to pull off. Bass is to water what quackgrass is to land. It doesn’t come out. »
Back home, I open The walk to love : “you are beautiful with all the future spared / with a frail sunlit beauty against the shadow”, say the following verses. And the bass are still swimming, but the summer is still young.