The one that got away.
I was in Waynesboro, GA, fishing on Gangie Dye's 10-acre farm pond. The word was this pond was hot for big bass, or at least it had been for the three hundred years since King George had deeded the property to the Dye family. I was in a canoe, fishing with a buddy of mine from Augusta, Lee Merry. If you ever happen to cross paths with Lee, ask him about this story. If he hadn't been there to witness it, I wouldn't be telling anyone this story.
Over the course of the day, we had hauled in over 20 well-sized bass in this stump-covered pond, and, with darkness beginning to set in, we figured we had done all the damage we could do - Lee started paddling us back to the landing. I let my purple worm sail for one last cast, letting it sink before jigging it a few times on the bottom.
A bass hit that worm like a SCUD. I drew a huge set on her and began fighting this monster. It was jumping clean out of the water trying to shake the hook loose, one time coming down and plowing away from the boat so violently she turned the canoe a quarter of the way around.
Lee was ecstatic, yelling with an abandon I hadn't heard since Ray Goff had become Georgia's head coach. And then it happened - destinies met, stars aligned, whatever it takes for the trajectory of a random low-flying dove to perfectly coincide with the Large Mouth of a largemouth bass exploding from the surface. There was a sound--sort of hard to describe having never heard the sound of a bird hitting a fish before or since-followed immediately by the heavy splash of the fish back into the water, and then nothing, just the echo of Lee's yelling quickly fading to perfect silence.
Neither of us said anything for seemingly an eternity. The line limped uselessly in the water; and the sun had slipped beneath the horizon, leaving us in dark silence. No line, no fish and no bird.
-Heath Timmerman
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