As a 17-year-old freshman at School of the Ozarks College in the mid-'60s, I studied fishing mostly! With Table Rock Lake so close, and my having a key to the gate and boat on the school’s property at a place called Clevinger Cove, you knew where I would be on the weekends. If I couldn’t get home to the Big Piney and didn’t have to work on campus, friends and I would often spend Friday and Saturday nights there on Clevinger Cove in an old, abandoned house. We’d spend hours paddling around Table Rock Lake in an old V-bottom boat fishing for anything we could catch.
That was back when the first Rapala lures were becoming famous, and somehow I got one, an old sample from my Uncle Norten, as I remember it. My uncle had caught an 11-pound, 4-ounce bass from Clevinger Cove years before I ever fished it. It was published in Sports Afield magazine as the biggest bass caught that year in the whole country.
Norten was addicted to big spinnerbaits, so I got some lures he was given because of that magazine’s recognition. One was that black and silver Rapala about 6 or 7 inches long. On a Saturday morning when the lake was high from spring rains, I tied it on and paddled back up into the end of the cove where a big green bush of some kind stuck up out of the water.
I couldn’t cast it a long way with that old Shakespeare reel and braided line, but just that once, it went back a little farther than intended and the line draped over the end of that bush. I gave it a jerk or two to try to free it, and that Rapala lure danced enticingly on the surface just past the bush.
Sometimes when a bass hits a topwater lure, there is just a boil of water on the surface and he slurps it under with a minimum of commotion. At such times, I think the bass is just hungry and wanting a good meal. But after all, bass are predators, and I am fairly sure that at times they just want to put on a show because they are mad as well as hungry.
That day in the end of Clevinger Cove, there was a mad bass lying beside a log just beneath that green bush. He didn’t want to just eat my Rapala; he wanted to hurt it. And so my lure disappeared in a spray of water that came up a foot into the air with that big, slab-sided bass. He crashed down on top of it, carrying it beneath that bush before I could even bend the rod real good. I gave it a good pull and set the hook enough to feel that he was a monster of a fish as far as the fight he put up. But I figure he laughed to himself as he burrowed beneath that greenery and somehow got my line beneath the log. I just hope those treble hooks hurt his jaw for a long time after he broke my leader. That’ll learn him!
Actually, it was more likely a "she" than a "he." Bigger, fatter and meaner bass are almost always females. And I am not insinuating anything here, but what the heck, females don’t read outdoor columns anyway, do they?
I have an even better story about Clevinger Cove that I published in a book entitled "Prince of Pt. Lookout ... Life and Learning at School of the Ozarks." I worked for the president, Dr. M. Graham Clark, back then, and he asked me to take him and a very rich lady fishing one fall day there in the old boat in the big cove beside school property.
Her name was Nettie Marie Jones, who was a major donor to S of O. I’ll write about that in another column sometime, how she caught a big bass that day herself. That afternoon may have played a part in the building of a big structure now known as the Nettie Marie Jones Learning Center, there at the school.
You can find that book and others at larrydablemont.com
