Continuing the lazy blogging “reflecting on the past” theme around here lately, I have for your viewing pleasure a few bass flies from my “golden age” of illustration. By golden age, I mean before I got distracted by a thousand other things, and let half of my trusty Rapidograph pens dry rock solid, with no hope of recovery. I’ll have to buy all-new points for the next book project, but in the meantime, I’ll keep posting a string of fish, fly and water drawings here at FF&W…

I grew up bass fishing (with everything from ‘crawlers, to jitterbugs, to poppers, and ultimately flies). For me, the largemouth bass was, and sometimes still is, a go-to fish. There is just something about the combination of a Northwoods lake choked with lily pads, an early morning brightened by steaming coffee, and that signature largemouth take…if you’ve fished top-water largemouth, well, you know what I mean.

If you’re looking for searing, flats-style runs, largemouth are not your fish. If you’re looking for technical approaches with delicately boned patterns, just pass on by. If you want to boom huge casts across vast rivers, with the hope of that certain “pull,” largemouth are not where you want to focus your time.

Chucking a meaty bass fly into edge of the lilies, or around the clutches of a snag, or under overhanging brush, is its own world. Perhaps the closest thing outside of the bass experience—for me—is fishing baby tarpon deep in the mangroves. But unlike tarpon, a morning spent working a bass lake seems more relaxed and less concerned with “now!” Certainly, when the take happens it is all about the “now,” but the moments leading up to that take often come across as lazier, or perhaps more contemplative. Or perhaps I’m just waxing nostalgic…

I will say that the most memorable time that I ever had fishing with my grandfather (on my mother’s side) was a June morning consumed by a single largemouth. I learned to run an outboard that day, and I won’t ever forget the misty Pennsylvania woods, the dip and twitch of the bobber, and the gill-rattling surprise that jolted me out of my youthful languor.

Largemouth may not be for everyone, but for me they are a fish that remains deeply intertwined with my angling life. When I think back, I also think forward—to the scent of water and pine, to the soft puttering of an old outboard, and to a certain vacuum take that can pull a whole morning into a single second.