The Twilight Zone

[Al Agnew]

I walked in the door a bit before 6 PM, and my wife Mary looked up in surprise. I was supposed to be fishing, and she knows not to expect me back from a fishing trip before dark-thirty.

"You're home early. How was the trip?"

That was kind of like asking the Chicago Cubs how their play-off games went.

In the beginning, I saw no indication that I was about to enter the Twilight Zone of angling. There should have been an eerie, ominous fog over Bismarck Lake when I arrived, or at least a moaning wind. But it was just a quiet, hazy late June afternoon. I slid the canoe into the water and loaded my gear and three fishing rods. Remember those three rods--they are an integral part of the story. I paddled across the lake to begin fishing. I didn't really have high expectations; Bismarck was known at the time for big bass, but not large numbers. If I caught one or two nice fish I'd be satisfied.

I fished for an hour or so without a strike before things started happening. Eerie things. Ominous things. But at first it just seemed like normal bad luck. I hung my lure on some piece of the brush, logs, old duck blinds, and assorted sections of 20 pound test monofilament that pave the bottom of the lake. The lure was down about five feet, and I stuck the rod tip underwater, reeled down until I snugged it up against the lure, and jiggled to free it. But the rod tip got entangled somehow and broke off as I pulled the lure loose.

"It wasn't my rod, was it?" Mary interrupted. I often use her outfit when she isn't with me.

It was my own best handmade rod, but no problem. I could fix it easily, and I still had two rods available.

About 10 minutes later I got snagged again. This time I was using a reel with 20 pound test braid, and I thought I could pull the lure loose by, as my mom used to say, "main strength and awkwardness". I leaned back on it and nearly fell out of the canoe when the rod snapped near the butt.

"Was that one my rod?" Mary wanted to know.

I was my oldest hand-made rod. As if that wasn't enough, I was unable to free the lure, which happened to be one of my last two models of that particular bait, and no longer commercially available.

I decided that crankbait fishing wasn't working anyway, so I'd try the lily pads. Mary's rod, the only intact one I had left, wasn't well-suited to the rigors of pad fishing, so I jammed the tip guide back onto the end of the first broken rod, and crimped it tight by laying it on the gunwale of the canoe and banging on it with my pocketknife handle. I tied on a lure I had devised myself for fishing the pads, which just happened to be the only prototype I had with me. On about the fifth cast I had my first strike of the day, an explosion that blew a 3 foot wide hole in the pads. I missed the fish. Three casts later I got my second strike and first fish, a three-pounder. Two casts after that, the lure picked up a bit of a dead pad. I reeled it in and jiggled my rod tip violently to get rid of the debris. Too violently. The line snapped and my lure--a sinking model, of course--went sailing into the only piece of open water in the midst of a huge cluster of lilies.

So much for pad fishing. I decided to paddle over to a part of the lake I seldom fished. I figured things couldn't get much worse.

Actually, for a while things got better. Using another of my home-made lures, a shallow-running wobbler, I caught a couple of small bass and another three pounder. But then I approached this big pile of brush. There should have been rumblings of doom at this point. I fished the brushpile thoroughly, hung up in it, paddled the canoe over and freed my lure. With the canoe wedged against the brush pile, I made a cast into open water and my lure was engulfed by a very big bass. The fish immediately charged straight toward me, dove headlong into the brush pile, tied a couple of boy scout knots around a limb, and broke free. Not only that, but the shock was too much for my hastily repaired rod tip, and it came loose and slid down the free end of the line into the murky water.

So now I was down to Mary's rod and another of my handmade lures. I had, however, discovered a real infestation of good bass, and I quickly caught a 4 pounder and another that was slightly smaller. It seemed to be turning into a great day, in spite of the various mishaps. But I wasn't out of the Twilight Zone yet, and Mary's rod wasn't safe.

Another real lunker took the lure just as it dipped beneath the surface, and I set the hooks with lightning reflexes. Unfortunately, my thumb somehow touched the free-spool button on Mary's reel as I reared back on the rod with all my might. FZZZZZZZZ!!!! and I was staring stupidly at a bird's nest a bald eagle would have been proud to use, while the big bass leaped on slack line and tossed the lure back in my lap.

I took stock of my equipment. Mary's reel was a hopeless case, but her rod was still intact. I still had two other good reels; all I had to do was transfer one of them to her rod...

But her reel had somehow gotten screwed down so tightly onto the rod that it would take a pair of pliers to get it loose. You guessed it. No pliers.

As I drove home, I kept looking for the black cloud that had to be following me.