By Nick Simonson

In a season where a mix of winter and spring suddenly gave way to summer, I found myself gently dangling my hand off the side of my kayak in a backwater connecting two lakes.  It was a Memorial Day weekend tradition for me to fish the mud-bottomed stop just downstream from the cabin, and a place where my love of largemouth bass fishing was fortified with many memorable outings during this time of year.  I watched as a cruising male bass inspected my digits flicking through the warm water of the shallows and looked ahead to see a bigger shadow up under an overhanging tree. 

Firing off a cast that skittered just below the timber, I didn’t have to wait long to see the jump in the gray Fireline laying on the surface.  Reeling up the slack I rolled right back into a hookset and the biggest bass of the day was on the line.  She pulled me into the branches and my backup rod in the holder behind me clicked against and snapped the twigs that the bass had imprisoned my small craft in.  Steering the fish to my right, I guided her out into the open water, and she took the lead, pulling me free from the arboreal obstruction before I lipped her and lifted her up. 

She had the hallmarks of having spawned out: a sagging belly, a few marks on her side, and a general acceptance that she had lost the post-breeding battle and awaited her inevitable release from my hand after a quick photo.  She was probably about three and a half pounds but would have pushed four just a day or two before with a full load of eggs. It was clear from all the activity – cruising males, nest guarding fish, and even a couple smaller females that were still plump with eggs – that my trip was timed perfectly.  The twenty fish I landed in my two-hour spin around the little lake suggested that as well.  It’s days when the fish are there, in the spot with you and everything times out right, that make for amazing outdoor memories. 

It also helps when the fish aren’t there to confirm how good things were.  As just a couple days later – still hot, still sunny, with no weird shifts in the weather – they were mostly gone, save for a couple of cruisers that darted off the edge of the shallows, and mere a pair of smaller largemouth bass that came to hand as all of the spawning activity from just 48 hours before seemingly ceased in a second trip to the well. While I did lose a bigger fish off the corner of a dock, it was evident that my shot at many big fish came in the first trip to the small water. 

But that’s angling, and it’s definitely been the case with this spring and our sudden shift to summer.  Things happen fast on a truncated timeline, when the water warms just right and does so quickly spurring fish into expedited actions to bed and beget the next generation of bass.  As the old angling adage goes: “you should have been here yesterday.”  Such a saying stings just a little bit less when you were there the day before (or the day before that, as it were) to catch a great bite and celebrate the fleeting moments of fun when fish go from here to gone…in our outdoors.

Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.

Featured Photo: Spawn and Gone. The author caught and released this big female largemouth bass in a post-spawn state before the shallows cleared as the water warmed in the week after Memorial Day. Simonson Photo.