For the second time in as many months, I’ve had the chance to pick the brain of a very skilled, very experienced fly fisher who spends a great deal of his fishing time chasing bass.
Rick cut his piscatorial teeth, as did many of us, chucking bait and hardware with family and friends from his youth; he, as did many of us, fell in love with fly fishing during a later stint in the Northern Rockies.
Rick happened to catch the fly fishing bug while playing scholarship football in Laramie years ago, and after a stint in law school (don’t hold that against him), ended up back in Wyoming and Idaho for the majority of his career. His own kids have settled in Texas, prompting him to split time between his beloved Wyoming and northeast Texas.
To hear him tell the story, he’s fallen hard for feisty bass, and he’s honed his skills across the South over the past decade.
The point of this story is simple: when asked how he learned the ins and outs of the bass game, he (as did the first bass-on-the-fly guru I’ve chatted with recently) insisted the trick was learning everything he could from good conventional bass fishers, which he describes as a “damn fun crowd, willing to teach and share at the drop of a hat“. (Rick went to expound on how fly fishers could stand to adopt some of those characteristics and enjoy life more, though I promised not to write about that.)
Within a week of my last conversation with Rick (during which I picked his brain on flies, local waters, and barbecue) today’s giveaway book showed up in the mail, Bob Woodard’s Eye to Eye with Big Bass.
Woodard is a retired educator, coach, and lifelong angler with a penchant for sharing and teaching what he knows about bass; I’ve never met or talked to Woodard, but from the book I’d venture he’s quite a character and has probably forgotten more about bass than most of us will learn in a lifetime.
A warning to friends who fall into the fly fishing elitist camp – Woodard is unabashedly a conventional gear guy and has recorded his successes on the water over the years with lots of trophy catch pics; there’s not a little portion of the book dedicated to managing ponds and lakes to cultivate your own bass army.
This isn’t your typical fly fishing tome, but it’s packed with information about catching and managing bass from the perspective of a ‘roll up your sleeves and get it done kinda guy’, which we tend to favor around our camp (a damn sight more than prissy, pedantic elitists in particular).
Want to up your bass game by looking over the shoulder of a giant in the bass world? Good for you, we have a brand-spanking new copy of the book to send your way. We’ll draw the winner’s name on Monday the 19th and ship it out that day; to enter just send an email here with Kiss My Bass in the subject line.
By the way, whether large- or smallmouth, sand, Guadalupe, or black bass, these fish are a hell of a lot of fun on the fly.
