. . . 15lb striper this past Friday night. So my girl and I are fishing, it is very calm where we are but with good flow. It is about 2 hours before sunrise and we are casting plugs. My girl, who has now been fishing with me since last summer has gotten darned good at casting and playing and landing fish. She has caught every kind of fish that swims in our water and has mastered topwater, jigging, live bait/eels and swimmers. She loves casting and hooking up the best, of course, who doesn't?
Here she is playing her fish even well after sunup this morning, can you tell how foggy it was Friday morning? I love this pic, I might even have it blown 8x10 and framed.
Both of us hook onto good fish and the fish make us cross lines as it is dark and we have no idea which way the lines go so I don't really worry about it and we do the rod swapping but at the cross the lines are now intertwined, to the point where I had to make the executive decision on which line to cut as I think I had the bigger fish so I cut one of the lines and as the tangle is so bad we now have to handline the fish in. The rod is now down against the gunwale and I tell my girl that I'll pull the line in and she will pull it in as well and lay it down on the deck so that if the fish runs I will act as the human hand/finger drag, this was much harder than it sounds. Of course the eventual 15-20lb bass runs and the line burns through my fingers making it a challenge to even type this tonight. I almost feel like the guy in that movie "Seven" who cut the skin off his fingertips so that he would have or leave no fingerprints, ouch! That line just smoked through my fingertips as I had to give it some drag or it would have just taken every bit of line we had been slowly gaining on every time it ran, and let me say that I was more in tune with what this fish was doing in the water than I have ever been after this rod/reel-less experience, but after 3 good runs we got it boatside in the very early dawn all the while thinking of what a story this would make, hand-lining bass at night.
I don't recommend anyone try this unless you have some leather gloves as it is painful but it was a decent fish and it was fun. My girl even said that this would be a nice challenge for us and that as I had never done it, she was happy to be a part of the experience. A girl who likes to fish and who doesn't mind getting up very early to fish, I am in heaven.
Congratulations on the fish, too!
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