The Ecstasy of Gold
BY NICK SIMONSON
DAKOTA EDGE OUTDOORS
It was one of those spring days we’ve had an abundance of: warm but not quite hot and just windy enough to make it feel cool. As a result, the river was quiet. The fact that it was midday left only me, following a long morning run that ate up most of the front half of my day, and a couple of boats scattered up the two-mile stretch I patrolled under clear blue post-frontal skies, propelled one way by the rising gusts and slowed as I turned back against them. All the while the click-and-wiggle of the perch crankbait tapped out signals from the bottom of the flow: a slow drag when it hit the mud in nine feet, a hard tap when it found a rock or boulder in the depths, and a steady whir when I found water over ten feet.
The afternoon wore on toward the dinner hour, and I sunk into the comfort of the captain’s chair, my bottom half dead weight following the morning’s workout. As tiredness crept in with the lack of action, I decided to troll the final stretch before returning to the marina. In the chute that paralleled the empty shore fishing area where normally a number of anglers stood on cloudy days and those with more favorable winds, I cruised along feeling the bangs and bumps of the rocks piled below in the snaggier stretch when suddenly one of them pulled hard, and hard again. I stood up and lifted the rod. With the heavy bend of a fish on the line, I snapped out of my daze under the bright sun and strong southerly winds that pushed against the boat as I slipped it into neutral and spun between the current pushing down on the stern and the wind pushing upstream on the bow. As the fish neared the surface, it sparkled with a bright gold that extended long and thick behind the drab perch crankbait precariously pinned in the corner of its mouth.
