Battered bass

13.5 inches of smallmouth bass fury.

It was definitely not ideal conditions for fishing on the Upper Potomac, but Karen has begged to go camping and threatened to go without me anyway, so I tagged along.

I fish with a few Mitchell 300 reels older than me.
The "4-70" mark on the spool indicates that the line was
changed sometime in April 1970. One of my eBay specials,
I've changed the line since then.

The river had been going down to normal levels, but then rain on Thursday changed all that.  The gauge at Williamsport rose from about three feet to seven feet.

When we arrived at the campground, the river didn't look very good.  Not terrible after winter snow melt, but the river was higher than when we were here last month.

The only spot I could think of that might be fishable was right below Antietam Creek.  Usually, this water is really shallow and featureless, but my guess (still learning this stuff) was fish might be holding in this area.

Sure enough, the water was higher than usual but not dangerously high at the Antietam Creek confluence.  I tried topwaters and a Z-Man TRD Finesse Worm and wasn't getting any interest.  Except a couple nibbles on the Z-Man worm, which I think were from sunfish.  Peck-peck-peck.

Finally I was rewarded with a smallmouth bass clamping on.  After a brief but furious fight, I landed the fish.  Upon closer examination, it looked like the bass had a run-in with ... something.  Right below the dorsal fins on one side was a puncture, like it was stabbed:

Like a hockey player, this smallmouth didn't let on that
it was injured.

On the other side was another mark below the dorsal fins.  And then I noticed a portion of the fish's tail fin missing.

Something got a piece of tail.

Otherwise, the fish seemed healthy enough.  It fought hard and was reluctant to get its picture taken.

After letting that smallmouth go, I didn't get even a nibble.  Not the rest of the night nor this morning.  The river had gone down a tiny bit, but it didn't make much of a difference.  The only highlight was seeing a bald eagle land in a tree on the West Virginia side this morning.  It remained there until I left, so the world's greatest fisherman wasn't catching any fish either.