Hooked

The visibility improved as the sun bled through the eastern tree line, although I was still fishing blind. Through the fog, I heard the propellers on the topwater lure, a Devil's Horse, thrash the surface with each twitch of the rod tip. The air was calm and heavy, and the humidity felt like a fleece jacket. Sweat ran down my face, stinging my eyes, yet I couldn't take my hands off the reel. Tucking my chin into my armpit, I dragged my face across my shirt sleeve. It was a fine late Spring morning in Southwest Florida to be rippin' lips. The bite had been fast and furious after arriving through a gap in the fence, traipsing through the palmetto and scrub brush, and picking off hundreds of those little "hitchhikers" that stick to your socks and shoes like tiny leeches.

Twitch, reel slack, Twitch… wait, "BLEOW!" He knocked it out of the fog and into sight, where it plopped. Letting it sit, I watched the water rings dissipate. Then, as predator fish do many times after striking, he struck again, the first hit not necessarily a "strike" but a "stun" to disable the prey. Hooked up! Shifting my weight from one side to the other, counteracting the fish's movements, and leading it away from obstructions along the bank, I did the "tight line dance." All the while looking over my shoulder like a thief in the night, as the area I was fishing may have been posted. Who can ever really tell about these things? 

I pulled the healthy two-to-three-pound Florida strain largemouth bass onto the water's edge and carefully "lipped" it with my non-dominant hand's thumb and index fingers while carefully working the hook(s) out with the other. 

Anyone who has ever caught and released a fish caught on a lure with treble hooks knows this is where things can get interesting. There are six points, six barbs, and three per hook. Pliers are the proper tool. However, sometimes the situation calls to travel light, such as the possibility of an escape and evade; in 00Redneck training (James Bond has nothing on us), pliers are deemed non-essential in this type of mission. So you wing it and hope the fish will be still, but they don't always, in which case you may find yourself in quite the pickle. Which is what happened with one unexpected flail, one flip - I was hooked. 

I imagine I resembled a looter carrying a 40-inch plasma after Katrina as I hiked back through the brush to my truck, holding my hand close to my body, hook, lure, line, rod, and myself one unit. If the barb wasn't sunk into the meat of my finger, it was by the time I opened the heavy bed cover of my truck and rummaged around in my toolbox, searching for a tool adequate to reduce the drag until I reached the walk-in clinic. During what felt to be about ten minutes, every move I made shook that Devil's Horse, and every time it did, I felt the hook digging around, twisting in my finger.

Some of you may be grimacing, imagining the trauma – sympathizing. Upon seeing my Facebook post, my cousin, Blair, texted me a video of himself performing the procedure on himself, complete with a moniker that means "less than masculine." Where I come from, you're probably not very popular if your friends don't haze you. 

For someone to perform at a "world-class" level, they will have over 10,000 hours of deliberate practice invested. As a writer, I'm about 40% there. As an angler, although I can't claim to be "world-class," I surpassed the 10,000 hours milestone decades ago. All that time near sharp hooks, and this would be the first visit to the ER. Considering all the close calls and near misses, those are pretty good odds – the story of my life thus far. 

Running trot lines in the Mississippi River, my brother Barney was snagged by a hook. We had baited a section and were moving to the next, the small outboard struggling to keep up with the current, when suddenly, our momentum had stalled due to the hook in Barney's tricep. As I watched in horror, Barney pulled enough slack in the trotline against the current to free the hook from his arm. That was some Huck Finn stuff right there.

Reggie and I were trout fishing in the grass flats of Gullivan Bay (when there used to be some) when he ended up with a #3 circle hook impaled in his finger. In the blink of an eye, Reggie grabbed some pliers and yanked that sumbitch out – just like that. 

Ned "bapped" me upside the head at Black Bayou with a Texas-rigged bullet weight that had to feel close to being hit with a small sap. Or maybe I slapped Ned with the weight in my backcast. I'll have to ask him. 

My coup de gras of close calls with treble hooks would be the two instances I had to take Turk to the emergency pet clinic. Turk was my Feist, who lived to be sixteen years old. I never went fishing without him, ever. He either loved fish or hated them because as soon as one hit the deck, Turk was on it. Once, he ended up with a rattle-trap in his paw, and the other time he attacked a bass that had yet to be released, resulting in bass, crankbait, and dog joined as one. You can imagine how that went. After all that, fishing on the bank of a small inland pond did me in. 

So, I go ducking in and around posted and no-trespassing signs and run down banks from security guards holding a rod with a fish attached to it? Which did not happen in this instance. Say I have an accident on your property? Believe me; I don't want you to know I was there. 00Redneck, remember? I'm addicted to the pull on the other end of the line, the anticipation and rush of the strike, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. 

Regardless of my debauchery, I will leave an area better than I found. I don't care if it's picking up one piece of trash. I realize that's not a feather in the cap of fixing the environment. It's just an example. It could justify my tomfoolery, "I may steal your diamonds - I'll bring you back some gold."  

As a Generation X white guy from Louisiana, I must be a rebel-rousing, crude oil-burning, hellraising, assault rifle-toting, environment hater. I may be many of those things, but as a Saltwater Cowboy, the backwater is my sanctuary. I challenge anyone to match my passion for the environment. 

The last animal I killed was a buck I'd hunted all season in 2008, but only because I moved from Texas and had a black Lab nearly the size of a South Florida whitetail, and I haven't killed an Osceola Turkey yet. Regarding assault rifles, I was thinking of getting one for the upcoming apocalypse. Otherwise, I have no use. My friend, Tiny, has several if I feel like firing off some rounds. 

Any true sportsman is an environmentalist. Why people from other parts of the country don't understand this is beyond me. We’re not all down here dumping cases of Ziplocs in the water.