“Max,” The Super Lure

One lure that has consistently tricked Trout & Bass into biting is the Kastmaster. It has a wonderful swimming action, which seldom twists your line. It is now available in a number of colors, but the only option was chrome or gold when I discovered the lure. It’s a great lure to have in everyone’s tackle box.

But that’s not what this article is about. It about one of those days you dream of, where everything is going right. I was on a beautiful mountain lake with a soft breeze kissing my face. The warn sun was on my back and Osprey were soaring overhead. They were easy to locate as they cried, calling others to come feed on the nice fat trout below. I tied a Kastmaster lure to my line and cast it into the emerald green water. It was attacked by a nice two-pound trout, which was struggling to be free, as three or four of his friends followed him to the boat. Yes that was a glorious day, that is, until a tree reached out and grabbed my favorite lure.

With malice and forethought, it reach out from the banks of the lake and snatched my lure out of the sky with a death grip, wrapping line around its limb and embedding the treble into the wood. At first I wasn’t concerned. This lure has escaped the clutches of snags in the water ripping the limbs from the water. Not even submerged boulders we able to steel “Max, the super lure” from me. We had been together for so long, it just seemed appropriate to name it. No this tree chose the wrong lure to mess with.

Being in my boat, I thought the rescue would be easy and it should have been. The lure was just a little too hi to reach it, while standing in my little aluminum boat. So I tossed a rope around the limb and lowered it to retrieve my friend. Just as I touched my prized possession, the end of the limb broke causing two things to happen simultaneously. The limb shot towards the sky like a rocket, embedding two of the three hooks into my hand. I reacted by falling out of the boat and breaking the limb a little further up the tree. Being focused on the pain of the hooks in my hand, I had not noticed as that evil limb struck a hornet’s nest.

When I surfaced, the air around me hummed like a blender with a bad motor bearing. I immediately retreated underwater, where I discovered that I had also capsized my boat. After what seemed like hours under my capsized boat, a rescue party pulled me from the lake, but accidentally sunk my boat.

The doctor at the emergency room had great difficulty removing the hooks because he was laughing and crying too hard as I explained what happened. Finally as the hooks were removed and my hand was sewn up, they left me alone for a moment with the remnants or Max. I knew he would be restored with a new split ring and treble hook. It would be like old times.

As I hobbled to the pay phone, to call my wife, I was trying to decide how I could explain this, because I had told her I was in Seattle on a business meeting. I hope I can get the boat out.

See you at the dock!

Ken Bear Cole
Fishing with Bear LLC