Given the choice of choosing between bass fishing and watching old game show reruns on TV, I'm afraid I would have to select the latter as my entertainment for the week! My tastes in angling run toward those species that are more eager to be caught



than the wily bass. I like to dangle my bait in the water and let a hungry fish drift by and grab it; nothing much more energetic than that!

Before you can do anything about bass fishing, you have to have a boat. This type of fishing seems to operate on the premise that if you can see them, they can see you and they won't bite. This makes fishing from shore impossible; you have to sneak up on them from the middle of the river or lake. Unless you have a boat, you can't really call yourself a bass fisherman!

Purchasing a boat and motor is not an easy job. First of all the prices that are being charged for new bass boats are astonishing! My first house didn't cost nearly as much as a decent boat costs today. Once you recover from sticker shock and you buy a boat and motor, it will have to be outfitted with a trolling motor, depth finder, and other incidentals you really need to hunt down the elusive bass.

When I'm on the lake or beach, I expect my fish to bite the bait I throw at them. Mostly I just watch the bobber dancing on the water and wait until it goes under. That is not the case with bass fishing aficionados. You have to have a large variety of lures in your tackle box if you're going to fill up the deep well in your brand new boat. Selecting the right type of bait not only is necessary; it's expensive!

If you troll around the lake with a minnow and hook, you're not considered a real bass fisherman. Unless your tackle box contains at least a couple of hundred dollars of bass lures, you're not a member of the club. I fully suspect that most of these lures catch more fishermen than fish.

Picking the right lure is a chore when there are so many to choose from. There are swim baits, crank baits, jerk baits, twitch baits, slash baits, spinner baits and worms. Then you have worms in just about every size, shape and color combinations you could ever possibly imagine. In this category you also have lizards, grubs, shads, crawfish, mice and frogs, all in squeezably soft plastic. I'm not bass socially correct because I still use minnows!

Just buying bait can be a traumatic experience. I never like to engage in unnecessary thinking and thoughts about having to choose among the thousands of lures available are making me crazy!

Fishing clothes are a different matter entirely. Gone are the days when you would see a bass boat with a couple of guys in T-shirts and denim cutoffs tossing a lure near a tree stump. Today's fashionable fisherman will be wearing a fishing shirt with large pockets on the front of the shirt and with epaulets on the shoulders. The shirt would come in a variety of colors, from peach to canary yellow.

Regular shorts won't work anymore. Bass fishermen of today must wear nylon fishing shorts, with cargo pockets to carry nutrition bars and powdered drink mixes to pour into their bottled water. The bottoms of the shorts are made of nylon mesh in case the wearer is thrown out of the boat and has to swim for his life. If that occurs he'll be suitably attired when he is dragged out of the water by rescuers.

Other considerations for the bass fisherman are his choice of rods and reels and fishing line. Bass rods come in a variety of categories; flipping rods, jerk rods, short rods and long rods. Reels suitable for bass fishing also come in different models. To make sure you have the right one, you should buy one of each and have them outfitted and stored on your boat. Whether you catch anything or not, you'll impress other fishermen when you meet them on the water.

By nature I'm a simple man and bass fishing has become too complicated for me. I'll just doze underneath a shade tree and wait for a fish to tug on the line tied to my big toe.