Bassasour

“Catching a Bassasaour”

As I mentioned, Boons liked to fish. He was one of my fishing partners. When I was living in Georgia, I was very happy to be near the reputed, “Large Mouth Capital of the World”. When I first got there, I had visions of catching bass like I had never seen before. I promptly beefed up my gear to handle the “Bassasourous Rex’s” that I envisioned catching. It didn’t take me long to learn that it wasn’t going to be easy to catch the hogs I had been picturing. It also didn’t take me long to name a scapegoat for my poor fishing luck. You see, in South Eastern Georgia there were alligators in what seemed like every pond. Alligators were very much protected in the South and everyone just accepted them without much complaint. Alligators weren’t into crop damage, they didn’t have the gall to damage fruit trees; they limited themselves to pets, small children and the occasional government official called in to remove the gators that had taken to eating pets and children. While this cycle of behavior was acceptable to many locals, Boons, Muddy and I were getting fed p with the bad fishing. Something had to be eating all the nice bass between stray German Shepards. It was obvious to us that gators were the problem…

We had taken to the technique of gator scouting before fishing. We would go out at night and spotlight a prospective fishing area. Gators were tough to spot during the day. A good way to find out how infested a pond was, was to spotlight it at night so you could see the glittering eyes of the gators residing there as they floated carelessly on the surface. Once we found a pond with out gators, we rejoiced as we anticipated finally finding a lunker filled honey-hole. We never did figure out why we never got into bass in the non-gator filled ponds though…We did enjoy one pond that seemed gator-less even though we didn’t catch many bass we were having luck getting big, fat flathead catfish.

One night at our pond, which we had managed to keep secret from other anglers and gators, we built up a nice stringer of fish. When it was time to go, I crawled down over the steep bank to retrieve my stringer, Boons was right behind me. I took the stringer off the branch it was tied to and tried to pull it in. It didn’t come in…I pulled harder, it still didn’t come…I figured it must have snagged on something so I gave the end to Boons and had him pull on it while I reached down into the water to un-snag the chain. As I was groping around in the black waters the water bubbled some and then the chain went slack. Boons pulled up on the slack and up came the stringer. On the end of the stringer, half way up my catfish was an angry alligator who hissed, then began to thrash my fish around. Boons ran for about one mile without stopping, right over small oaks, through a swamp and I think he went through a barn…wall, and out the other side he finally stopped once he had run out of air. He said something choking as he finally was able to throw me off his back.