Fishing Report 9/19

[Scott McKee]

Headed with my brother Bruce and our buddy Tim for bass.  Tim has a rapier wit and is one of the world's great ball-busters. Unfortunately for the McKee brothers, when Tim is catching fish we hear about it often. Tim decided that our bass trips needed a few new rules besides the most and largest, which he considers banal.  Here's a few of our rules:

If one angler catches four consecutive fish, he can place one the other anglers on board in "time out" for five minutes.  Today Tim placed Bruce in "time out" and he felt shame.  If Tim would have rattled off four more consecutive fish, he could have sat me down or taken Bruce out of the game for twenty minutes.

Catching three different species grants the angler a "multiplier".  I'm not sure what this means, but you feel good all over when you catch your multiplier fish.

If two anglers each have a fish on at the same time, the third angler loses a fish.  The two with the double get to decide which fish the third loses.  A double with both fish exceeding 18" costs the third unlucky angler five fish.

For example, I popped a 30" musky today, which was my third species of the day and gave me a multiplier (still no idea), but because Bruce and Tim had a double after my catch, I lost the musky and my multiplier.  Got it?

I regained the multiplier when I landed a 33" casting later in the day and had to dodge two near doubles to keep it.

Did I mention you can also steal your buddies fish?  When an angler has a fish on the others on board can attempt to steal the fish by snagging the line or by grabbing the fish from the water or net first.  This makes for some interesting fights and net jobs.  I was lucky, Bruce and Tim didn't try to steal either one of my muskies.

There are more rules to our game, but they involve lit cigarettes and ritual cutting, which is of course completely untrue.  We have more rules, but only Tim seems to know them.

It was a musky day out there today.  I had a big follow early and lost another 'Ski when it leaped as I was setting the hooks and the combination of these events almost launch the mid-thirty into the bow of my boat.  I tried to convince the boys that we should musky fish the whole time, but they do love their bass.  A few more Wednesdays of bass madness and then it's full time musky.  I hope they don't steal a Top Ten from me.

[Frank Stachowiak]

Scott - I think you will need to take an NFL replacement ref with you to interpret and call those rules.

[Scott McKee]

We are using out of work NFL refs.  Last week we had Ed Hochuli on board.  He blew a few calls and spent most of the day pumping iron and flexing.