FOREST AND STREAM 
49 
From An Anglers Note Book 
By Robert Page Lincoln. 
A SPAT of water there in the rushes, a splash, 
some outrunning circles and you have wit¬ 
nessed the rise of the prime favorite, the 
large mouth black bass. You deftly enough will 
send your weedless bait into that pocket, muster¬ 
ing all the skill you are able to locate, backed up 
by a great deal of experience and knowledge of 
the fish and his ways. Plump! There it falls, 
just one foot this side of the nucleus of the now 
faded ripples. You proceed to reel in. Your arti¬ 
ficial minnow represents swimming frog to a 
nicety, throwing up two distinct rolls of water 
over its wings. Suddenly the water fairly seems 
to break, and a savage mouthed bass has the 
thing in his jaws. A jerk, the hook is set; whirr, 
whizz-z, goes the thin calibered silk line off the 
aluminum reel spool, and a fight is on. 
He makes a rise out there between the reeds, 
but your oarsman is aware and is making for 
clear water. You reel in and give out line; he 
darts for the boat, and systematically you gather 
up the slack. Out there again he rises, and with 
his gaping jaws wide he shakes his head to free 
himself from that deceitful apparition he took 
because it seemed to have no business invading 
his own paricular domains. But in the final 
round, with your hook firm in his mouth, you 
fairly drag him out of his cool home in the deep. 
Among our game fishes most commonly pursued 
is the large mouth black bass. He is a friend of 
all—a figure to conjure with indeed and of im¬ 
mense importance to members of the piscatorial 
world. This fish is found in scattering abun¬ 
dance pretty near everywhere east of the Missis¬ 
sippi river, throughout the northeast of Canada, 
and south as far as the termination of the land 
in Florida, where some of the biggest specimens 
have been taken; one, the largest I believe, weigh¬ 
ing fifteen pounds, being twenty-eight inches in 
length. In the western states black bass have 
been planted, but there they do not seem to fare 
very well. In California the black bass may be 
found :n good numbers along the San Jouquin 
River, and some very good fishing is claimed for 
this fish through Idaho and Washington, though 
of this I have only hearsay evidence, and I am 
following no expert’s book. Among our northern 
states, Minnesota has a name for having the best 
bass fishing in the country, and with so many 
lakes within her borders, practically all supplied 
with this pugnacious fish, it is easy to understand 
why she lays claim to especial mention as a bass 
state. 
The average bass, seemingly large, may be 
thought to weigh about four pounds. As a mat¬ 
ter of fact they are so deceiving in their weight 
that an apparent four pound bass dwindles upon 
the scales to one pound and a half. The truly 
heavy bass are always rather short but they are 
heavy set, full-rounded, and corpulent. A six 
pound bass upon the hook is a problem to debate 
upon. For fighting, and a lot of it, such a bass 
will supply the widest demands, and if it proves 
the big one that got away you will understand 
why, since skill of rod and reel manipulation is 
something to wisely remember. 
In years when fine weather has been the rule, 
bass spawn earlier than is their usual wont, but 
when unseasonable weather interrupts, the spawn¬ 
ing is delayed sometimes over two weeks, and 
then it is not rare to find bass along in the early 
days of July, still bearing their unshed eggs. Pre¬ 
sumably all bass should be spawned by the first 
of June, at which time the fishermen are allow¬ 
ed to take them, but a great number will be taken 
unspawned. The bass in the early part of the 
season will be found swimming the shallows by 
the thousands. The writer has seen some waters 
of the north fairly teeming with this fish at this 
season, and they have so eagerly taken any bait 
cast to them that it was not a wild guess that two 
might be taken on a hook at one time. 
Bass will take a lure best while in the shallows. 
The bait caster is fortunate, for as yet the weeds 
have not appeared to encumber him, and he may 
use either the surface minnow or the submerged 
artificial. A floating minnow of light wood, 
sanely colored, and having some attractive inven¬ 
tion upon it, is almost sure to win some fish. The 
man who wishes fish, entirely, hooks on a frog, 
casts it in among a drove of the parading tribe, 
allows it to sink to the bottom, and when one of 
the festive ones has absorbed it to its everlasting 
sorrow, he deftly hooks him and commences to 
pull him in. This sort of fisherman may take 
the limit in a short time, but where sane and 
sportsmanlike methods are shown, fair success 
likewise may be had. A good artificial minnow 
may be had for seventy-five cents. Reputable 
makers put out some costing as high as a dollar 
each, and they are all that time and skilled work¬ 
manship can make them. I have tried out prac¬ 
tically every wooden minnow in the country 
worthy of the name, and I have discovered that 
if you have accumulated some bass wisdom—if 
you have been a patient student, if you have 
been thoroughly observant, then you may take 
your minnows out with you, and you will always 
get fish. But there are some men who could fish 
with artificials till doomsday and never gain more 
than a fluttering strike. It seems to me that if 
some fishermen would put in a little more hard 
work, a little more good, true, study, they would 
get more fish and there would be fewer consistent 
failures. 
My favorite minnow is the Coaxer. I have 
other favorites, you understand, but they are not 
all around favorites. I can use the Coaxer any 
time I want to, in weeds and out, and I get a fair 
number of fish almost always. The Coaxer has 
the recommendation of Will Dilg, Dr. Henshall, 
Louis Rhead and happy-go-lucky Robert Davis 
who took the sting out of casting. Davis in a 
moment of utter delight said: “If that Coaxer 
don’t catch fish I'll eat it myself.” The Coaxer is 
a combination butterfly-swimming-frog and this 
phosphorescent bait may be used at night with 
signal success. Being weedless, it claims leader¬ 
ship among them all. 
The Dowagiac baits put out by the Heddon 
Company are well known. Among the first arti¬ 
ficial baits I ever used were their small bodied 
baits, with a brown cracked back and a rosy-yel¬ 
low belly. This bait has one trailer gang, and 
that is all. The set of three hooks is hid in buck- 
hair. This bait, and all others like it, are not 
only sportsmanlike but they are fish winners, 
often under the most detrimental conditions. 
The South Bend company also puts out some 
very fine ones like it, and I would never think of 
being without them. Such baits are sane, both 
in appearance and in the number of hooks they 
carry. 
To fish with artificial minnows means much 
patience and study of the bass, its actions, its 
peculiarities, and its main characteristic, that of 
refusing to take one bait one day, and eagerly 
snapping it up the next. The concensus has it, 
upon some very eminent qualifications, that bass 
take minnow out of exasperation, otherwise 
anger, and not that they think it is food. But 
some minnows seem to me to be almost wholly 
useless. A minnow must combine some of the 
living attributes of some swimming or flying 
thing naturally found in and around the fishes’ 
habitat. Usually a minnow imitates a frog in mo¬ 
tion, though on the face of it the resemblance is 
nil. Otherwise, practically two-thirds of the 
minnows are eyed, and shaped like fish. 
Select for your minnow always something that 
is attractive. A gaudy colored minnow proves 
sometimes too unreal. Red I consider a very 
good color. 'For just as an angry bull will take 
after a red shirt, so will a persistently tantalized 
large mouth hit a red bait amidships, with a thud 
that is felt all through the rod arm. Green and 
white in some variety of coloration, merged and 
blended are also excellent. All white baits remain 
the leaders, for they are easily seen in the water 
with the sharp sunlight upon them. The Lock- 
