One lure challenge.

It is the perfect time of the year for fishing. The crappie have left the deep waters, the bream are hot, the bass are hungry, heck, even the trout are being unloaded in the mountain streams. The weather has been nice. That is saying a lot in itself considering we often have a two-week rendition of spring between winter and summer.

Many years ago, my oldest son and I entered a fishing tournament hosted by a former boss. Well, he was my current boss at the time, but now he is my former boss. Now I am my only boss, except for the many clients I go through each year, which means I have way too many bosses, but I digress.

Anyway, we entered a work fishing tournament. There were a number of prizes, as it wasn’t your typical largemouth bass tournament. This one was a catch what you can no matter what bit the hook tournament. There was a prize for the largest fish, the longest fish, the most fish, and even the smallest fish. It consisted of fishing three ponds. They were large ponds, and boats were allowed.

My son and I were in a square stern canoe with a trolling motor. However, there were everything from the normal aluminum john boat to fully rigged bass boats that were backed into the various ponds.

Now, there are times I can act cocky. This usually occurs when around co-workers who like to talk trash. When talking things such as hunting, shooting and fishing, our group tended to talk a lot of trash. In fact, we could probably have made Larry Bird and Michael Jordan feel slightly inadequate to our greatness based on our trash talk game.

This playful cockiness resulted in me stating I could likely win the tournament using just one lure. This would be akin to when Larry Bird told his teammates he was only going to shoot left-handed in one of the games. You see, overwhelming and over-the-top cockiness can lead you to a belief in yourself that you wouldn’t have under normal circumstances, and rather than just playing to win, you end up challenging yourself because you don’t see any real challengers other than yourself.

I have been known to do this several times in my life. Once I was asked exactly how good I was shooting a bow, and I picked up a small washer off the workbench and told the co-worker I could put an arrow through the hole form twenty yards easily. In mere moments I had several co-workers laying money against each other about whether I could or couldn’t. As for me, I didn’t measure the hole and soon realized there was so little clearance between the actual diameter of the arrow shaft and the hole of the washer that you couldn’t even put a piece of tape around the arrow’s shaft without scraping it off as you push it through. Long story short, after work we had about twenty guys and gals lining up my twenty-yard shooting lane, we had a drum roll and lots of hoopla, and I made the shot. The winners of the bets agreed to pass enough of their winnings to me so that I could replace the arrow that was damaged as it passed through the hole though. Again, I digress.

As for the fishing tournament, I went with one lure. Now if I was fishing for largemouth that day, I would have went with a Mister Twister grape worm. It is my favorite. It doesn’t work on everything however. To just catch fish, it is hard to beat either a live nightcrawler or cricket. But again, the issue there is it isn’t one lure. You kind of need to have several worms and crickets if using live baits to catch more than one fish.

What was the go-to lure you may ask? I Beetle Spin in yellow with black stripes. I don’t know that I have ever not caught anything with it. That day didn’t disappoint either. Did I win? Well, I will leave it to your interpretation based on one last fact. The game Larry Bird decided to shoot left-handed to try to even the competition, he scored 47 points and added 14 rebounds and 11 assists.