*This is the first of two parts.
Participants in recent bass tournaments on the Ohio River have posted on Facebook about how the river is a tough venue. One spoke of how handicapping mistakes can be and of how difficult it is to get 12-inch keeper fish. Another reminded pond and small impoundment anglers—I would include myself in this group—that we do not understand the difficulty of bassing on the Ohio.
Though I have fished the Ohio very little and not for eleven years in the manner of those who run the big water in search of bass, I believe I do understand the challenge. The main difficulty about the river is that it is vast, and in vast waters success depends of finding the small holes that are most productive. The mouths of creeks, their embayment’s, and initial stretches are the most obvious of these river honey puddles.
Tough though it may be, I wish the Ohio were a regular stop in my angling schedule. It is not that I crave a bass boat with all the gadgets and gear. If that were the case I would have it. I am not a machinery person and do not want another item of it in my life. But if the world had remained as it was while I was growing up in Springdale, I would be a frequent bank fisherman at the mouth of Cabin Creek. Sometimes I would walk to get there, and on other occasions—if I wanted to have the option of fishing out in the channel— row my twelve foot aluminum johnboat timidly along the shoreline up to it from the old Springdale landing, where generations of village sport and commercial fisherman moored their craft and live fish boxes.
I first fished for bass at the mouth of Cabin in the autumn of 1958 when I was 11. I had been fishing with my dad in the creek potholes for a couple of years, but for some reason he did not discover the fall spotted bass fishery at the mouth until that year. This was several years pre-Meldahl and there were two smooth black stones on the west side, which were at varying stages of inundation depending on what was happening at old US Lock 33, dimly visible in the downstream distance. Daddy always wore hip waders to set a plastic minnow jug, so he often waded out and stood on the larger stone to fish.
The spotted bass was our primary target, mostly in the ten to eleven inch class, with an occasional “big one” of 12 to fourteen. Live river shiners were our bait of choice and perfectly matched the hatch. We also caught skipjacks when they made their feeding runs. Occasionally we would bait for catfish with their parts and entrails. Some town fishermen used Glenn L. Evans Shysters, a spinnerbait in the style of the Mepps and current Rooster Tail, and for those who ventured by boat under the bridge and up into the creek waters, the Helin Flatfish in Green Frog was the favored lure.
Most everyone was a keep and eat angler. Daddy and his mother, my Grandmother Lutie Bette, loved fried fish. If we caught more than we needed, there were neighbors who didn’t fish but who liked to eat them. By the fall cool down, folks believed that the “oily” taste from riverboat fuel had left bass flesh. The limit back then was ten and ten, and it was our hope to collect our two limits of keeper fish, but I don’t remember accomplishing that, though we had some big catches on days that brought bites as soon as every minnow hit the water. Most thrilling were those topwater strikes when a lively shiner, with no weight other than the hook, struggled to stay on the surface and a fish took it there.
Now I will make a revelation that may surprise readers. We did not know that the fish we were catching were Kentucky, or spotted bass. We thought they were largemouths. I had never seen a fish chart or pictures of the black basses. The largemouth was not frequent in the river in those times, and as best as I recall, it was when I was sixteen in 1963 that I caught a fat 13-inch bass that was different from those I had always caught and from the others I caught that day. It was a paler green and had a different eye color. I was fishing alone that morning and the bite was not very hot, but I caught a few nice fish and exhausted my small supply of shiners. I tied on a small curved gold metal fish-shaped lure called a Thin Liz. The bigmouth hit it as it wobbled on the drop. That first largemouth was also my first catch on an artificial bait, but I don’t remember anyone identifying it as a largemouth.
