A half a month of texts later and we all converged on Friday July 29th at a campground that had a little bar/restaurant and a spot for us to crash for the night. I pulled in first with McSteel right behind me. Stepping out of the truck, I commented on the sweet smell of the northern pine.
We found our campsite and didn't even bother with the tents, instead, fishing out a beer and deposited ourselves on the (obligatorily) brown painted picnic table.
Mr T showed up next . He pulled his rig, drift boat in tow, in front of the bar/restaurant and stepped out. He made the same comment about the smell of the northern pine. The same comment...like we had practiced a script in order to make a point and convince McSteel of something. All it convinced me of was that Mr T and I needed to get north more often.
Through charm, good looks and pure charisma, the three of us talked the two ladies out smoking on the front step, the bar-keep and the cook, into keeping the grill open and making us some burgers. We also got them to concede to Mr T keeping his rig parked right where it was, through the overnight hours.
The burgers were fat and juicy and the beer was cold. The menu was almost like a throwback to the 80's. "Northwoods Prices," is what McSteel called them. The whole thing would've been perfect if some jokester hadn't dropped a quarter in the jukebox and selected Arlo Guthrie's, "Alice's Restaurant" which provide the background noise for nearly half our stay at the place.
Back at the dirt patch and picnic table, we set up camp and would have turned in right then if somebody hadn't passed me my Yeti cup overflowing with tonic but mostly gin.
The next sentence in this narrative should, after all of the goodness above, include me drifting off to sleep and waking refreshed to bluebirds singing. That might have been the case if Mr T and McSteel didn't have a snore-off with the intensity and volume of the Steve Vai and Ralph Machio guitar duel in Crossroads.
The geese honk at 5:20 AM.
At least here they did.
Up.
Coffee, gas station breakfast, camp tear down, scout the takeout, run the shuttle, load the boat, shove off.
From here my recollection gets a little fuzzy....and I've had almost a week to think about it.
The sky was mostly sunny, the temp was hot but not melting, the wind wasn't a factor...at least with casting. The bass started off a little pokey and we messed around with some topwater stuff and streamers. (Between these two tactics we had two sizeable muskies follow. Mr T, the muskiest guy of the three of us, picked up the 10 wt and tried to convert but the fish didn't reappear.) Some decent fish were caught but we needed to work for them for the first couple of hours. The scenery was seriously stunning. No homes or other boats on the main float and the river rocks and healthy stands of trees make me rank this as one of my favorite smallmouth floats.
As the we made our way down river the thing that makes fish eat, happened. I don't know what that thing is....water temp, barometric pressure, time of day, all three, something else entirely?
But it happened.
Certainly there were a number of 12" bass caught but they came between 16" and 18" fish. One fish grabbed the fly as we were braced for some white water and we had to find a back eddy to drop anchor so we could land it. That fish was over 20". Every pocket, softspot, rock and sweeper held an eating fish. Casts, 99% of them were dead on. It never rained and the beer stayed cold. The mosquitoes must have all died and all that remained for pestilence were a few deer flies...and we killed most of them.
I'm pretty sure I'm not exaggerating.
With the river day behind us and the boat back on the trailer, we stopped for a celebratory beer.
To paraphrase, the conversation went something like this:
One of us: "That was $#&@ing unbelieveable..."
Another said: "It really was."
The last guy said: "Yep."
That is how you know when a plan comes together.
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