Before I went to Lake Ferguson this morning I was thinking about my daddy going fishing when I was too small to actually fish. Sometimes I’d just tag along to watch. He would go down to the Yacht Club while it was still dark and walk down the old wooden barges with an old steel rod, a direct drive reel with some of that old black line and a Creek Chub jointed minnow tied on. The Creek Chub had a metal diving lip and a little tin tail. I guess it was the early version of a swimbait. Daddy would swing the bait down next to the barge where there were no ropes and bob the bait up and down in the water.  A lot of the strikes came from where the barges were joined together. He lost a lot because when he hooked a bass he had to pull it all the way up on top of the barge. Remembering this, catching bass on top in 30 feet of water, I went to the Yacht Club in my boat first off and started casting the Cripple Killer around the docks. The bass cooperated and would hit the topwater hard but I was having trouble hooking them.  They were small and probably not getting enough of the hooks. When that played out, after 8 in the boat, I went to the North end and had a drought for a while. I found a sandy bank with a few fish on it and broke out another bait from the past, a Johnson Sprite.  A Sprite is a silver spoon with a treble hook on the back. It worked,  and along with a Carolina rig, got me up to 13 fish, none big. I was preparing to come home and was scanning a spot with the depth finder when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I yelled and dodged by leaning up in the seat. A silver carp whizzed by my head and hit the cowling of the motor, landed in the well behind the back seat, and made a tremendous mess with blood and green poop everywhere. Needless to say, after that I came home. Here he is.