The Colorado River Has Seen Some Shit – (Aside from Titties)

There’s a photogenic bend in the river at Parker where red rock cliffs launch themselves skyward from the water, an epic desert landscape billions of years in the making. The Colorado River has spent millions of years carving its way through this country, exposing layers of geological history that make a human lifetime seem like a grain of sand in the ocean.

I turned to Doc.

“Doc, imagine being that rock formation, chilling there for millions of years, watching all this shit change around you. The river carving out the landscape, entire civilizations coming and going. The whole history of the world unfolding right in front of you.”

We sat there for a moment, taking it all in. The cliffs. The river. The sheer, incomprehensible scale of geological time.

Doc finally broke the silence.

“Yeah. Imagine how many titties it’s seen.”

And that, in a nutshell, is Doctor Randy—and one of the many reasons I enjoyed fishing with him from his Ranger Z521R Comanche.

You also want Doc on the front of the boat because he knows this fishery.

Case in point: we’re literally in three feet of water within eyesight of Parker Dam. A massive riffle. A tailwater, if you want to get all fly-fisherman about it. And I’m skeptical. This looks more like the San Juan than a desert bass fishery. I should’ve brought my 6 weight Hardy Zemith.

But having hooked plenty of big rainbows in fast-moving, clear, skinny water, I’m not entirely unconvinced.

Then Doc pulls out a Whopper Plopper, and I start questioning everything.

He makes a cast and then—

EXPLOSION.

An almost three-pound smallmouth comes out of nowhere and absolutely smokes that obnoxiously loud bait.

“Soooo, that’s how they do it in Parker,” I mutter, scrambling for the net.

Or there’s the time during prefishing when we pull up in the middle of the channel. It’s a goddamn demolition derby. Packs of jet skiers swarm us like Hells Angels, powerboats sporting multiple 500-horsepower engines scream past my right ear, and the wakes are rocking the boat hard enough to make standing upright feel like an extreme sport.

Meanwhile, I’m supposed to cast, detect a bite, and set the hook in all this mayhem.

And just to make things interesting, we’re sitting in eight feet of water. In the middle of the channel.

Hey, Doc. Should we be sitting here like a couple of fucking ducks while the entire boating population of Arizona tries to kill us?

I keep that thought to myself and put my faith in Doc, along with my three-eighths-ounce Keitech green pumpkin jig and Deps Spiny Craw trailer.

I cast into the salad Parker is known for and work the jig out of the grass, accounting for the current pulling it slowly downstream. The whole presentation feels suspiciously like tight-line nymphing, which isn’t exactly what I pictured doing while prefishing for a bass tournament.

I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve accidentally wandered into a fly-fishing trip with significantly more horsepower when—

THUMP.

“Doc, I’m on.”

A chunky two-and-a-half-pound smallmouth hits the deck with a flop.

“So THAT’S how you do it in Parker…”

Prefishing

We put together a 17-pound-and-change bag on the first day of prefishing. We could do no wrong.

Which, of course, was the problem.

In tournament fishing, prefishing is the cruelest kind of foreplay. You find fish, figure out how to catch them, and then have to leave them alone so you don’t educate the entire population before the tournament even starts.

Thursday morning, beneath a pre-dawn desert sky, we motored out to some grass in the main channel and immediately got two fish to eat topwater. In a fun-fishing situation, you stay and enjoy the show. In prefishing, you leave fish biting to go find other fish that might also be biting—or other spots that might be productive.

It’s a ridiculous concept, but apparently that’s how you’re supposed to do this.

So we left.

We moved maybe a hundred yards and started working a tule line. Parker has no shortage of tules, and I was throwing my Anti-Ika. Well, technically, it was a Keitech Salty Core Tube.

I have a long-standing beef with the hookup ratio on Ikas, and the Keitech is my answer to a problem that probably doesn’t deserve as much space in my head as it gets.

My first cast lands in the front row of the tules.

TICK.

It felt like The Unnamed Marina again.

“Seriously? First cast?“

WHACK.

Four-pound largemouth.On the rod that was bought for the marina but ended up switching sides to the freshwater.

At this point, I’m mentally spending our tournament winnings. I’m making plans. I’m making space on my mantel for the hardware. I’m allocating money we haven’t earned on the assumption that fish will continue behaving exactly as they have for the last fifteen minutes.

Hubris is a motherfucker.

We caught fish on the jerkbait, a Megabass X-Nanahan.

We caught fish on the jig, the Keitech Type 2.

We caught fish on the free rig with a D Style Geelacanth Creature Bait. Doc hit spot after spot, and practically everything he put us on produced. By the end of the first day, we had a bag that would’ve made most tournament mornings feel pretty damn good.

The following day, the bite changed, but we still managed around fourteen pounds. We left prefishing feeling extremely confident in our game plan for the two days that actually counted.

We had fish. We had techniques. We had locations.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Current — Tournament Day 1

I’d checked the projected release schedule the night before. The cubic-feet-per-second numbers were climbing. Quite a bit, actually.

I mentioned it to Doc, and we acknowledged it the way you might acknowledge that there’s a little weather coming. Something to keep an eye on. Nothing worth getting worked up about.

Then we hit the channel.

Holy shit.

The water was moving. Not in the abstract, technical sense of current that you discuss while staring at a graph on your phone. I mean moving. The kind of current that makes you wonder how long it’d take to end up in Blythe if you accidentally dropped your trolling motor.

And just like that, several of the areas we’d caught fish in during prefishing weren’t playing the same way. The current had changed the equation, and our carefully assembled game plan was suddenly about as useful as a weather forecast from last Tuesday.

We scrambled.

The priority became finding water where the current wasn’t ripping quite so hard. We managed to locate a good largemouth holding against a bluff wall. It wasn’t the morning we’d envisioned, but at least we were putting together pieces of the puzzle.

Around eleven, the release eased up. We started picking off fish here and there, salvaging a day that had gotten off to a pretty rough start. But the consistent action we’d enjoyed during prefishing? Gone.

We finished the day in third place with 12 something pounds.

Third place is a good position to be in. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it’s also frustrating when you’ve spent two days figuring out a fishery, only to have the conditions change underneath you before the tournament even gets rolling.

The fish hadn’t disappeared. The river hadn’t stopped being the river. We’d just been reminded that dam releases don’t care that the West Coast Bass Anglers are in town.

Tomorrow, we’d have to figure it out all over again.

More Current and Now Clouds — Tournament Day 2

If Day One gave us current, Day Two brought the clouds.

The overcast conditions seemed to shut down the smallmouth bite we’d enjoyed during prefishing. We still caught fish, but those chunky three- and four-pounders that had made us feel like geniuses a couple of days earlier remained conspicuously absent.

We ran much of the same pattern we’d used the day before, trying to find productive water and put together a limit. Somewhere along the way, Doc picked up a little dock talk and decided we needed to incorporate a chatterbait.

Now, I like a chatterbait bite as much as the next guy. There’s something deeply satisfying about a fish absolutely annihilating a vibrating hunk of silicone and metal, especially the Japanese stuff I was throwing: the Jackall Super Break Blade FINE and the OSP Metal Blade SPEC 2 with its clear blade. We even managed to put some keepers in the boat on it.

So we rolled with it.

We later discovered that Doc had misheard the original dock-talk conversation. The recommendation had been for a crankbait, not a chatterbait.

Que sera, sera.

At least the chatterbait fish didn’t seem particularly interested in correcting us, although they did lack the size that would put us in the money.

And with that, the bigger problem was culling. We had a thirteen-inch fish in the livewell that stayed with us for the better part of the day, refusing to make room for anything better. We caught fish, but nothing that would bump that little bastard out of the lineup.

I probably caught that rat considering how I was fishing.

We finished the day with another small limit and dropped to fourth place overall.

I know we’re not supposed to watch the scoreboard. You’re supposed to focus on the next cast, the next bite, the next opportunity. And that’s good advice, even if it’s advice that humans have been ignoring since the invention of scoreboards.

I couldn’t help thinking we could’ve done better.

We’d found fish during prefishing. We’d caught them on multiple techniques. We’d had days when everything seemed to line up, when Doc put us on fish and I could do my part without overthinking every little thing.

Then the current changed. The clouds rolled in. The smallmouth bite faded. And the fish that had seemed so cooperative a few days earlier became a lot harder to convince.

That’s tournament fishing. You don’t get to choose the conditions, and the fish don’t owe you a damn thing.

We fished clean. We didn’t lose any fish. We adapted when we had to, even if the adjustments didn’t produce the results we’d hoped for.

And we finished fourth with something like 24 pounds.

Not the result we’d envisioned when we were putting together seventeen pounds during prefishing and I was mentally shopping with money we hadn’t won. But not a disaster, either.

More importantly, Doc and I survived six days together.

I’ve taken trips with people that didn’t last half that long before the wheels came off. Six days in a boat, chasing fish, dealing with changing conditions, making decisions, and spending enough time together to discover all the little things that can make another human being unbearable.

We made it through without incident.

We caught some good fish, I learned a new fishery, and I spent four days on the Colorado River with a guy who knows where to find them—and who, apparently, has a very different appreciation for the historical significance of ancient rock formations than I do.

Fourth place wasn’t first.

But it was a hell of a trip.

And I’d fish with Doc again tomorrow. Any day of the week. Just as long as it’s a team tournament. 😀

We spent the drive back to LA listening to Vicente Fernández while Doc regaled me with stories from his days in medical school in Guadalajara, how he first got into bass fishing, and his adventures at El Salto and Bacarrac. “Pescando lobinas,” as they say down south.

And we did what any two tournament partners do on the drive home. We went over every decision, every fish we caught, every fish we didn’t, and all the things we could’ve and should’ve done differently. We talked about what we’d do next time, where we’d go, and how we’d get them.

There would always be a next time. Another lake, another tournament, another stretch of water that we’re going to kill in prefishing, but then have it go south in a hurry.

That’s the funny thing about these trips. You go out there thinking you’re chasing fish, a check, maybe a little hardware to put on the shelf. But somewhere between the first cast and the long drive home, the fishing becomes only part of the story. You remember the ridiculous conversations, the blowups that surprised you, the ones that got away, the landscapes you couldn’t quite believe were real, and the guy sitting beside you who made the whole damn thing better.

We finished fourth at Parker. We didn’t win the tournament. We didn’t even figure out exactly what we’d done wrong.

But somewhere out there on the Colorado River, between the current, the clouds, the fish, and Doc’s appreciation for titties before ancient rock formations, we got ourselves one hell of a fishing story.

And years from now, I probably won’t remember every fish we caught or exactly what we weighed. I’ll remember those topwater explosions, those red cliffs, ‘Cente on the drive home, and laughing my ass off in a boat with Doc.

I’ll remember my first time at Parker.