There’s nothing like the plaintive howl of a youngest son to turn Ma into a baking dynamo, and likely she made older brother eat a bar of Ivory Snow for high-grading the baked goods.
It’s the same rush of adrenalin that allows Mom to lift a car off a child, trifling details like “he’s round as a butterball and could afford to lose 20 pounds,” is lost in the rattle of pans and flurry of baking powder.
The least I could do was take older bro fishing, now that I’d ratted him out, an opportunity to torment him further – dancing just out to fist range – chanting “Ma loves me more’n she loves you..”
Little brothers are pricks even in their dotage.
New water was in order as I was still smarting from Saturday’s outing. We moved upriver to a stretch neither of us had seen, sandwiched between two gravel quarries.
I don’t think the fish had seen a fly before and we had our hands full; smallmouth, largemouth, sunfish, hardhead, and pikeminnow assaulted us in large numbers, mostly smaller fish – and the action was brisk.
“Igneous Rock” was fishing a Manhattan Leech and I started off using a similar fly I call a Jelly Belly, it’s another glass beaded monstrosity using oily rose colored glass beads.
The above fish is a Sacramento Sucker in pretty stressed condition, note the copepods attached to the lower extremities. He’s wearing a Jelly Belly, making him a double sucker.
Almost identical to the Pikeminnow, Sacramento suckers are distinguished by a bit more yellow pigmentation, and the lateral line is straight; Pikeminnow have an upward slant to the lateral line at the rear of the gill plate.
This time of year water is both low, and extra warm – making fish vulnerable to parasites.
I swapped out the smaller fly for the Little Stinking Olive – I’d had time to produce some variants that had double the lead of the earlier flavor, and added 4 strands of soft crimp Aurora Blaze Angelina to the tail. It’s the dredging version, fast sinking and with a bit of flash to assist in deeper, darker water.
Everything ate it, including bluegill and sunfish.
Older Bro busted off his leech and I palmed a Little Stinking Olive, it was time for some horsetrading. “OK, I’ll give you one of these, but you must renounce all claim to my Lemon cake, there’ll be no ‘tithing’ – no ancestral blood right, no imminent domain issue with the goodies, deal?”
I glanced back his way and saw him with a fish on, “See, I told you!” He paused long enough to call back, “hell, this ain’t the first one, this is the fourth fish..”
It was the scene from “Dances with Wolves” – two fellows separated by an insurmountable gulf of sugary citrus infused plunder, thinking, “Good Trade.”