Читать книгу Fishing For Dummies - Greg Schwipps - Страница 94

It was rainy and windy on June 2, 1932, and 19-year-old George Perry was out before dawn with his fishing buddy Jack Page. “My father died the year before,” Perry later recalled. “I had my mother, two sisters, and two brothers. We lived three creeks further back than anybody else, and in those days it was a good deal of a problem just to make a living. I took money we should have eaten with and bought myself a cheap rod and reel and one plug.”

Perry remembers that he wasn’t feeling very lucky that morning on Montgomery Lake near Helena, Georgia. He tied on an imitation of the local baitfish, the creek-chub. A bass took the lure. Perry struck but couldn’t budge it. Then the fish moved, and Perry knew he was into a major bass. When it finally surrendered, even though it was enormous, Perry later said, “The first thing I thought of was what a nice chunk of meat to take home to the family.”

Thankfully, Perry had the presence of mind to make a detour at the general store in Helena, Georgia, where the bass that he had pulled out of Montgomery Lake tipped the scales at 22 pounds and 3 ounces, duly notarized and witnessed. It is a world record that stands to this day. (Although the record has been tied, with another giant fish caught by Manabu Kurita in Japan in 2009.) With his place firmly enshrined in the history books, young Perry went home and prepared a very large largemouth meal for the family.

Similar to its largemouth cousin, the smallmouth is a native of the Mississippi drainage, which makes it a true heartland fish. Where the largemouth likes slow or still water with lots of food-holding weeds, the smallmouth prefers clean, rocky bottoms and swifter water. Lake-dwelling smallmouth might school up, but in rivers and streams, they are more solitary. Similar to the largemouth, the smallmouth is an opportunistic feeder; both crayfish and hellgrammites score well (as do lures that imitate them). Unlike its largemouth cousin, the smallmouth is usually bronze and has a series of dark vertical bands along its flanks, shown in Figure 4-2. The dorsal fin of the smallmouth is marked with a shallow notch between the spiny part and the softer part, while the largemouth’s dorsal fin reveals a deeper notch (one that almost separates the two parts). Another difference is that the smallmouth’s upper jaw does not extend backward beyond the eye. Smallmouth bass, on average, are smaller than largemouth bass, but under ideal conditions can grow upward of 12 pounds.