Editor’s Log Needle In A Haystack (Of Bass) - The Fisherman

Editor’s Log Needle In A Haystack (Of Bass)

It was the Sunday night after a weekend of hard northeast winds. I drove to look at the water and saw that the seas were not nearly as gnarly as I expected, I immediately knew I wanted to fish and exactly where. I dropped a text on my buddy Keith, he responded “let me pack a bag”.

The bite took a little while to materialize, but as the flood tide started to find its footing, we started landing some decent fish in the 15- to 20-pound class. Somewhere in that first hour Keith hooked up with something a little bigger, I could hear his drag screaming over the rush of the waves and I could see his rod bucking violently as it went. Then a single expletive cut through the drone of the wind and surf, the fish had come off.

But Keith was now confident in his plug choice, a 1-1/2-ounce Super Strike Needle. Not long after the dropped fish, I heard a loud crack and another word that I can’t print sliced through the night like thunder. Keith backed up and bent over to assess something, “What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing good!” was his reply.

I expected to hear that he had broken his rod, but it was actually his line. A wind knot had halted his cast, snapping his braid and sending his needlefish sailing for warmer climes. I could hear the dejection in his voice when he said, “that was my only needle in that weight and my others were hanging up in the rocks.” What’s worse than finding the magic bullet and then losing it?

It didn’t matter too much, the fishing was great and while my soft plastic jig was doing more damage than his darter, we both landed good numbers of fish. At the height of the bite we were catching 20- to 25-pound bass on almost every cast, it was definitely a night I will remember.

When things started to slow down, the adrenalin was pumping hard. Keith was visibly high on the stuff, he laughed like a 10-year-old and said, “Everyone deserves a little easy fishing once in a while!” At that point, we were just picking away at them and I looked to see Keith hunched over his reel, in that same moment, my jig felt odd in the water, I couldn’t maintain contact with it, no matter how hard I cranked.

I started to think that Keith and I were hooked together, I figured he was hunched over because he was dealing with another wind knot and thought maybe his line was out when he noticed it. I asked him but he was actually changing his leader. The next thing I knew my jig swung out of the water and then was immediately yanked into the darkness to my right by something unseen.

After wrestling my jig out of the wind, I found braid wrapped around the leadhead. At first, I thought there was a fish on one end, (that actually happened to me once), but it turned out to be a clump of weeds that was being manipulated by the pounding surf. I gathered the braid until the other end came tight. It was hung up in the rocks, but every time a wave would pass it came free, so I stuck with it. And after a couple minutes of this finessed game of tug-o-war, I heard the sound of a plastic plug rattling on the rocks. I picked up the yellow, 1-1/2-ounce Super Strike Needle and said, “Is this your needlefish? I bet it is…”

“NO WAY!” Keith replied, before letting out a long, bellowing laugh.

It was his needle. I don’t know if it’s more surprising that we had made hundreds of casts and landed dozens of fish in the nearly three hours since he lost it without snagging it sooner or that it was still in the same zip code after three hours of pounding surf and raging current! After all of the wild experiences I’ve had in my 25 years of fishing the nighttime surf, nothing seems so absurd that it would be impossible. And while it is the adrenalin rush that makes fishing so addictive, these stories and the friends we experience them with, are the thread that stitches it all together.

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