I Set a Bass Fishing Record, Then Was Nearly Killed By a Tornado

This story, “The Week of the Big Bass,” appeared in the November 1961 issue of Outdoor Life.

In my home town of Hoisington, in central Kansas, the afternoon of March 15, 1960, was hardly a time to make a man want to go fishing. Spring was behind schedule, there was snow on the ground, a raw wind was sweeping the prairies, and now and then cold rain pelted down.

March is usually too early for good fishing in our part of the country, but it’s the month when I don’t want to wait any longer. In spite of the weather that day, I had the worst case of fishing fever I’d had in a year.

I’ve fished most of my life, all the way from Mazatlan on the Gulf of California in Mexico to Gods Lake in northern Manitoba. I’ve caught sailfish and arctic grayling and just about everything in between, and I have some strong feelings about fishing.

It’s not only my pet pastime, it’s also the medicine I like best, the perfect cure for pressures and tensions under which just about everybody, and business and professional men in particular, are compelled to live. I’m convinced that a lot of hustling young businessmen would stave off premature heart attacks and like ills if they’d take time out for fishing. A decent amount of fishing at frequent and proper intervals will keep a man young and add years to his span.

I’m an automobile dealer, and there’ve been some kingsize headaches in our business the past few years. By the spring of 1960 I had gone through a whole Winter without doing any fishing, and I was wound up tight as a watch spring. I decided I was going to take a trip regardless of weather.

Before supper I put through a call to my friend Lon Lowry, who runs the Texan Lodge at Lead Hill, Arkansas, on Bull Shoals Lake a few miles south of the Missouri border. Lon’s place is 450 miles from Hoisington, but that big, sprawling impoundment has lunker bass that are exactly to my taste. I figured it would be worth the drive.

“How’s fishing?” I asked Lon.

“Lousy,” he grumbled. “Every bit as bad as the weather.”

“Well, I like to catch ’em when they’re hard to get,” I countered.

“This ought to be the time for you then,” Lon said. “I haven’t seen a real good string in two weeks.”

“Save us a room and get a boat and guide for us,” I instructed. “Violet and I will be at your place by noon tomorrow.”

My wife, who likes fishing as well as I do, helped pack our gear, and we drove part way that evening. We rolled into Lowry’s about 10 o’clock the next morning after a short night’s sleep. The weather hadn’t improved.

Half an hour later we were at the boat dock. Lon had made arrangements with John Wiggins, who runs the Lead Hill dock, and one of his guides, L. R. Criner, was waiting for us. Criner was frank about our chances. “Ain’t hardly any use to go out,” he said. “The few bass that are feedin’ hit before 9 o’clock. Nobody’s been catching any in the middle of the day, and I don’t reckon you’ll even get a nudge.”

“L. R.,” I told him with a grin, “we came down here to do some fishing, whether we’ catch anything or not. But now and then there’s a fish around that hasn’t. heard about the rules and bites when he’s not supposed to. Let’s go look for a few of that kind.”

“Suits me fine,” he agreed, matching my grin.

Bull Shoals, an impoundment on the White River, straddles the Arkansas-Missouri line. It’s 87 miles long, covers 45,000 acres of Ozark hill country, and is 229 feet deep at the dam. It has around 750 miles of ragged shoreline and reaches back into the timbered coves like a dragon with too many legs to count. Its feeder creeks, deep and shallow water, points and bars, drowned cliffs, and submerged thickets make it just about everything a bass or bass fisherman could ask for. Filled in 1953, it has developed into one of the hottest big-bass spots in the country with a record for lunkers that few lakes can match.

Sam Welch, who lives in the town of Bull Shoals and keeps score on catches for a group of dock and resort owners, has chalked up a total of 18,397 bass between four and 12 pounds, caught in 143 weeks during the last four years (1957-1960) on the Arkansas side alone. In the best period he has ever recorded-late April and early May of 1959 — 1,357 lunkers between four and 10 pounds were reported to him in two weeks. Number of weeks checked in each season varies somewhat, but his score for that year, from mid-March to late October, was 6,131 — four to 11 pounds — in 33 weeks.

The most productive way of fishing this big reservoir, especially in early spring, is to cast a jig-and-eel combination and delay the retrieve until the lure settles on bottom — often 35 to 60 feet down. Lift it with a few slow cranks of the reel, let it sink back, lift it again, and keep that up all the way to the boat. Some jig-and-eel addicts let their lures lie motionless on the bottom for a few seconds between each series of cranks. Most fishermen prefer to cast away from shore rather than toward it, especially at points and other shelving areas. This enables the anglers to walk their lures back into the shoals from deeper water at snail pace, close to or on bottom all the way. Many of the best fish taken this way are caught at night.

But I’ve never cared for this bottom-scratching, whatever the results. I have my own methods, tried and proved on many waters over many years, and I reason there are always some unorthodox and uninhibited bass hanging around willing to meet me on my terms. With spawning season coming on, I felt sure there’d be big fish in shallow water, and that was where I proposed to go after them. Violet and I tied on twin-spinner and jig lures, with light-yellow jigs and four-inch black eels. That’s a favorite color for eels on Bull Shoals. I was using an extra light-action, 5½-foot casting rod that allows me to feel every dip and wiggle of my lure. I’ve long believed that the action you give a bait has a lot to do with what it accomplishes, and this rod gives me the control I like.

I waved the guide the proper distance offshore from a rocky bank where bleached tops of a few drowned trees showed above the water. It was a spot I knew from other trips. I cast smack up against the shore, picked up”the slack with the rod tip the instant the lure hit the water, and made a fairly fast retrieve. Violet followed suit. Our jigs were never more than two or three feet below the surface, and we kept them moving at a good clip.

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Criner said nothing, but disapproval was written all over his face. At the end of 10 minutes he shook his head sadly. “You ain’t going to catch bass that way,” he told us. “You let that little old eel down on the bottom and make him crawl back real slow. Maybe then something will happen.”

He was going to say more, but just at that second I hooked something solid and heavy with no more give than a stump. For an instant I thought it was a stump, but then lit bucked like a Brahma bull coming out of a rodeo chute. I was fast to a Bull Shoals lunker.

A light rod means a good fight, which is another reason I use one. I had forgotten, even before we left the dock, every business care and worry. The first sight of Bull Shoals had swept all the cobwebs out of my mind. But if any had lingered, that bass would have taken care of ’em in the next 15 minutes.

He’d came out of the drowned trees, and his big idea was to get back where he’d come from. I was using a 12-pound test line and couldn’t horse him, and for a few minutes it was touch and go. He lunged, thrashed, and bored, and I knew if he got in among the snags I was sunk, He had weight and a lot of power, but I made him fight the rod, and at the last minute he changed tactics and came busting to the top.

He jumped and tail-danced, and I saw for the first time just how big he was. I pulled him off balance and he went down again, all the way to the bottom. But the savage force was going out of his rushes now, and it was just a question of time before he was ready for the net. L. R. scooped him in and we hung him on the scales. They said an ounce under 7½ pounds. I had caught bigger, but he’d given me a rousing quarter of an hour of what I had come for, and he was big enough.

We fished an hour after that without a strike, but nobody minded. Lunker fishing is much like hunting big game. You don’t expect action every five minutes. When something does happen, the satisfaction and excitement more than make up for the wait.

I finally got another strike off a brushy point. It was a good, hefty fish, but no match for the first one. It weighed 5¼ pounds. As things turned out, it was the smallest of the four I caught that day. We took time out for sandwiches and coffee, and shortly after we went back to fishing I boated my third bass, a seven-pounder. The last one, between six and seven pounds, came shortly before we headed back to the dock in early evening.

Violet had fished the whole time without a strike, a brand of hard luck that doesn’t often befall her. Criner had put his bottom-bumping technique to the test most of the afternoon but had had no better luck than she. We left the dock early next morning, and it was almost three hours before I raised my first fish, in fairly shallow water back in a cove where a creek trickled in. I reached close to a sunken log with the same jig and eel I had· used the day before, and as I picked up the slack the. water in front of the log exploded and I had my hands full of the best things Bull Shoals has to offer. When the excitement was over there was an eight-pound seven-ounce bass to my credit.

I landed five good fish that second day, but Violet and the guide were skunked again. The third morning, however, Violet got in the groove with an eight-pound two-ounce lunker, and before the day was over she hung two more, both five-pounders.

We stayed six days, and on the poorest day we took three bass over four pounds. The last day I took two that weighed 8¼ pounds apiece. We won L. R. over to our way of casting, but for some reason he couldn’t make it pay off. At the end of the six days we had caught 30 bass above seven pounds. The eight-pound seven-ounce fish I landed the second morning was the biggest.

By the time we were ready to head for home, my fishing fever was cured. “You know you’re leavin’ here with a pretty bad reputation for not tellin’ the truth,” Criner told me with a chuckle while we were loading the car. “And mine ain’t any better.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Ain’t hardly a guide or fisherman around the place believes you caught those bass the way we claim you did. They all say you had to go down on the bottom to do it.”

“We’ll come back a year from now and convince ’em,” I laughed.

But as so often happens, when the year was up and it was time for a return trip to Bull Shoals, my situation was altogether different. In January of 1961 the thing happened that I’d preached against and counted on my fishing to stave off. I suffered a heart attack. I guess I just hadn’t been taking enough of my own medicine.

By mid-March, with a couple of months of enforced rest behind me, I was improved enough to ache for a fishing trip. I went to my doctor, M. 0. Steffen, who was also a good friend. “I’m feeling good and getting bored,” I told him. “Any chance I can go away somewhere for a week or two?”

“Just the thing,” he agreed. “You head South and lie around on the beach and soak up sun. It’ll do you good.”

“Doc, I’m surprised at you,” I reproached him. “You know me better

I meant a fishing trip. I had Bull Shoals in mind.”

“Nothing doing,” he growled. “You’re not ready for that kind of exertion and excitement yet.”

“But if I’d leave all the exertion to the guide, don’t you think a little excitement of the right kind would be good for me?” I wheedled. “I’m awful tired of doing nothing.”

Doc is a fisherman himself, and the decision was a foregone conclusion. But before he gave in he shook a finger under my nose an& barked like a drill sergeant, “Remember now, no exertion and no excitement!”

“I promise, Doc,” I said meekly. After supper on the evening of March 15, 1961, a year to the day, I made a phone call to Lon Lowry once more. The weather was much like it had been the spring before, and Lon again reported sourly that fishing wasn’t good. But remembering what had happened a year earlier, that didn’t bother me.

“Fix us up with a room, a boat, and a guide,” I told him.

We left home right after breakfast the following Monday. Everything was ready at Lon’s when we pulled in around noon on Tuesday, but I decided to rest the balance of that day.

We left the dock about 8:30 next morning, heading for the same area that had been good to us a year before. We rigged up with twin spinners, yellow jigs, and black eels again, and started casting to the bank and retrieving fast. Our guide this time was Lucky Griffith. He watched us make three or four casts apiece, looking as if he didn’t quite believe his eyes. “Doggone if you don’t do it just the way Criner said,” he blurted.

“How did you think we did it?” I needled him.

Lucky grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t believe a word when L. R. claimed you made that catch a year ago fishing the bank and right at the top,” he admitted. “We don’t have much faith in that down here, not this time of year.”

“Wait and see,” I suggested.

Violet drew first blood, off a rocky point. Her bass weighed an ounce under 7 1/2 pounds. I followed with one a pound lighter about an hour later. The action was spotty, but we were hunting lunkers and didn’t expect a strike on every cast. When we went back to the dock at suppertime we had four fish on the stringer, none under six pounds, none over eight.

In deference to Doc’s orders and common sense, we set an easy pace. We fished two days and rested one. The fourth morning we’d been out less than 10 minutes and I had made only half a dozen casts over a long shelving point when I hung my hook on a brick wall. The lure just stopped dead.

Waiting the necessary few seconds to give a big bass a chance to get the whole bait in his mouth is always an agonizing business, but I managed it on the assumption this had to be a bass.

Then I socked the hook home. It was a bass all right, and when he made his first surge for bottom I knew I had hung a real lunker.

I like to play a fish as well as the next man. I’ve fought big speckled trout on light tackle until they rolled their bellies up and quit cold and I could lift ’em in without a net, and I’ve boated sails for no other reason than that they were tuckered out and had no fight left in them. But that was in open water, and the place where I had hooked this bruiser was anything but that. There was brush all over the bottom and snags along shore, and he was determined to hang me up. I suppose when a bass gets that big he learns the hard way how to get rid of hooks and break lines.

I didn’t give an inch more than I had to, and he took all he could get. It was a rough brawl, but it didn’t last much more than 10 minutes because I didn’t dare drag it out. He was still full of fight when I brought him up to the boat and we swapped a few punches right there. Then Lucky made a dive with the net, and I was looking at the biggest and handsomest bronzeback I had ever caught, a nine-pound 10-ounce fish. I whooped like a Comanche lifting a scalp.

It took my wife a minute to get her voice. Then, in a tone that was supposed to be soft and soothing but didn’t quite make it, she undertook to calm me down. “You’re not supposed to get excited,” she reminded me.

“Excited?” I yelped. “Who’s excited? I thought you and Lucky were both going to jump overboard before I got him in.” But to myself I added, “Boy, I’m glad Doc Steffen didn’t see that performance.”

Bass around two to three pounds were up on the shoals in numbers that morning, and we caught and released one after another. Nothing under four pounds rates in the lunker class on Bull Shoals, so we didn’t bother to keep count. Violet landed a five-pound three-ounce fish early in the afternoon, and not long after that I felt two or three light taps as something mouthed my eel. It latched on solidly; I slacked off and waited the prescribed time, set the hook hard, and had the big battle of the morning all over again. When we hung this one on the scales my eyes really popped. He weighed nine pounds 15 ounces.

“You’ve got yourself a record,” Lucky told me. “Two of that size in one day. I don’t reckon anybody’s ever done that on this lake before.”

When we got back to the dock that evening, John Wiggins backed the guide up too. So far as he knew, mine, with a combined weight only seven ounces short of 20 pounds, were the two biggest bass any fisherman had taken from Bull Shoals in a single day.
It was turning out to be a fabulous trip, and I was having so much fun that I quit worrying about Doc’s ban on excitement.

I had caught my two big ones on Saturday. Sunday was hot and humid, a good fishing day, and bass under the four-pound limit kept us busy. I finally took a five-pounder, and shortly before noon Violet had the battle of a lifetime with a fish only an ounce under nine pounds. By that time the sky was full of black, ominous-looking clouds, and we could hear the mutter of thunder off to the southwest. We didn’t like the looks of things, so we quit fishing and started for the dock.

Back at the motel I turned on our TV for a weather forecast, but before the announcer got around to it Lowry rapped on our door. “You two better come down to the office,” he suggested. “That sky has an ugly look.”

I knew what he was thinking. This day was a tornado breeder.

Rain started to fall in torrents while Violet and I were scurrying for the office. Lon met us on the porch and we stayed outside to watch the storm. Hailstones drummed on the roof. Lon’s wife, Ruth, came out and joined us, and then off in the southwest we saw what we all dreaded, the black funnel of a tornado reaching down to the ground. It was still a long way off, but we could see dust and debris being sucked up into the inky sky. We could also hear a far-off roar as if a train were rumbling across the hills.

“It’s coming through here,” Lon shouted above the noise of the wind and rain and hail. “There’s a big culvert over there.” He pointed across the road. “We better crawl into it.”

We ran for the culvert, drenched and pelted by rain and hail, but it was plugged at both ends with dirt and rubbish washed in by earlier storms. The tornado funnel was only half a mile away now, bearing down on us with what looked to be terrifying speed. We could see trees going down in its path, and while we watched, it dipped and twisted over a barn and the barn exploded in a swirl of dust, boards, and fragments of roof. The roar was as frightening a sound as any I’ve heard and we looked frantically for shelter.

A ravine angled down to the road just beyond the culvert. I motioned to Lowry, shouting to make myself heard, and we grabbed our wives and half ran, half stumbled into the ravine and dropped face down at the bottom of it.

The twister was roaring up a ridge a quarter of a mile away by that time.

Then it did one of those freak things that is characteristic of such storms. At the crest it swerved and followed the ridge like a train on rails. It roared past us 200 yards away, turning the whole world into turmoil, mowing trees like a giant scythe and shaking the earth as if a whole convoy of locomotives were thundering over a trestle. A second barn stood in its path. The tornado flattened it like a huge roller, and dirt, hay, and broken lumber boiled up from the ruins like dry leaves in a whirlwind.

Then the funnel lifted and slowly dissipated itself in the angry black sky. We got to our feet, dripping and muddy, too shaken and too full of relief and gratitude to say much. As we trudged back to the motel, wet and wretched looking, I thought once more about Doc’s injunction against excitement. “I’m glad he wasn’t here,” I muttered to myself. “He’d never let me go fishing again.”

The weather was clear and fine next morning, and Violet and I went fishing again. We fished a total of 6½ days before we headed back to Hoisington. We learned later that Sam Welch recorded only 79 bass above four pounds that week. Of that number we had taken 12, with a combined weight of 85¾ pounds. We counted nothing under four pounds. My fish of nine pounds 15 ounces was the biggest. We had caught them all by the one method and lure, and this time most of the guides accepted our story.

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March may not be the best time to fish Bull Shoals, or to fish anywhere for that matter. But it’s the month when I need a fishing trip most, and any time of year that will produce such catches as Violet and I took on those two visits is plenty good enough.

You know where we intend to be another March? Lon Lowry and John Wiggins both know. Our plans are firm, and they have had our reservations down a year in advance. The rest will be up to the lunkers. Of course I’ll have to avoid exertion and excitement. Especially excitement.