“This is the life,” said the thirtysomething fisherman who stood on the deck of a bass boat, watching bald eagles, great blue herons, even a couple of deer that ran so effortlessly through a nearby marsh you’d have thought they wore snowshoes to keep them from sinking into the muck.
Now and then, the young man would catch a largemouth bass that had been thoroughly fooled by a plastic worm. It was bad enough that the lure was made of synthetics rather than a real nightcrawler or a baby water snake, but the angler rigged the worm “wacky” style — meaning he inserted a 2/0 hook through the center section of the fake food, then cast it across dense mats of milfoil and hydrilla inside the Potomac’s Chicamuxen Creek.
On average, a bass would suck in the crazy-looking, sideways-walking imitation every 10 casts or so.
The fisherman was my nephew, Lothar “Lou” Mueller, who had flown around the globe to visit his widowed mother and a sister and brother, plus a gang of nephews and nieces. Truth be known, high on his list of priorities was Lou’s desire to fish in the land of his birth.
Lou lives and works in Australia, about 40 miles outside of Melbourne. His wife, Karyn, is a native Aussie. Of course, so are his two sons, Ryan and Alex.
But ask Lou what he thinks of Australian fishing — fishing, by the way, that most uninitiated Americans would believe to be fabulous — and you’ll get a surprising answer:
It’s not necessarily so.
“In the area where I live, near Melbourne, it’s terrible,” he said. “I keep thinking of the great bass fishing we have right here in the middle of Washington and miles downstream, and as far as I know there’s nothing like it in Australia.”
To be sure, there’s wonderful but expensive Australian offshore fishing for marlin and other exotic species, and there’s great but also expensive fishing for inland species in the north of the continent that requires plane rides and the hiring of outfitters.
To simply hook up your boat, drive a couple of miles and launch it in a place like the fish-rich Potomac, Patuxent and Rappahannock rivers, or in good lakes such as Anna, Gaston or Kerr, is unheard of in Australia — particularly in heavily populated areas.
“I’ve gone fishing a couple of times in the north of Australia,” said Lou, “but in each case when I returned, I was pretty much broke. Nothing is cheap. You guys can fish every day and do it for a couple of bucks worth of gasoline and the price of a yearly license.”
Imagine us ever griping about our wonderful country. Have we gone bonkers?
On a bright, sunny day on the Chicamuxen Creek, Lou and I caught somewhere around 30 bass. Many were small, some were decent and the only real trophies we hooked we never saw. Get it? Every time you hook and subsequently lose a fish, you get a free pass. You’re permitted to guess the weight of the bass or whatever else just jumped off the hook.
“Hey, I lost a 10-pounder just now,” you can say. Who’s to prove you wrong? Lou and I played that game all day, laughing like children, but we also landed a fair share of non-trophies.
The boy loved it. (I can call him that, having waited with the rest of the Mueller clan in a hospital on the Christmas Day when he was born.)
When we returned to the marina docks and loaded the boat back onto its trailer, Lou had the look of a famished youngster on his face. I knew what was on his mind, even though earlier he’d eaten four sandwiches.
He wanted to visit his favorite J&B Barbecue shack on Route 225, west of La Plata, in Charles County. Once there, we ordered a “slab” of ribs — spicy dipping sauce on the side — and devoured the tasty delights as if they were the last ones ever to be roasted over hot hickory embers.
“How are the barbecued ribs Down Under?” I asked. He looked at me, a succulent rib clenched between his teeth, and shook his head.
It meant there’s no place like home. Lou had flown 12,000 miles to rediscover it, although he admitted that Australia was a good alternative as far as being with people who, by and large, were very pro-American and who lived pretty good lives of their own.
• Look for Gene Mueller’s Outdoors column Sunday and Wednesday, and his Fishing Report on Thursday, only in The Washington Times. E-mail: gmueller@washingtontimes.com.
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