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Josh Bailey of Indian River with smallmouth bass caught on Crooked Lake.

The “Deadly Nedly” strikes again.

Josh Bailey of Indian River with smallmouth bass caught on Crooked Lake.

The “Deadly Nedly” strikes again.

It’s all about the bass, about the bass, no treble … or was it trouble?

Either way, Meghan Trainor could have been singing about spring smallmouth bass. If ever there was a trouble-free fish designed to cooperate with fishermen in which bigger bottoms and bellies are better, it’s definitely the smallmouth bass. On a sunny spring day, they practically beg to be caught, and you don’t need a treble hook to catch them. Unfortunately, I’m not really good at it. But I have friends in all the right places, and Josh Bailey is one of them.

Josh is one of those 28-year-olds dedicated to the pursuit of smallmouth bass. He’s already on the tournament trail as he and a friend from Saginaw placed second last summer in a 100-boat tournament based on Burt Lake. But what I appreciate about Josh is unlike some egomaniac rock-star tournament fishermen, he’s humble. His truck is covered with green sponsor-wrap, if you could call helping people with daily disasters at Serv-Pro a sponsorship. And in effect it is. He works hard at his 9-5 job just like the rest of us so he can get out on the water and fish just like the rest of us. His boat is a simple Lund Rebel 16-footer without the usual bells and whistles of a serious bass boat. He has a sonar and GPS which he rarely uses other than to know the water temperature. And while the bow mounted trolling motor is pretty useful, it’s his rods, reels and lures that he says are most important.

Like many serious bass fishermen, his lures are organized in neatly labeled Rubbermaids. And he has a LOT of them, all arranged in stacks of matching sizes and colors. While it was soothing to thumb through the trays, almost like flipping pages in a 3-D Cabelas catalogue, it was also kind of ironic. Josh only uses about five different types of lures, and each one is prerigged on its own rod and reel so he doesn’t spend much time tying on a new lure. He just grabs a different rod. All of which might paint a mental picture of a hyper-analytical bass fisherman frothing the water at a competitive, sweat-inducing pace in an effort to efficiently use each nanosecond of fish producing time.

Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Josh kindly met me at Crooked Lake on a cold Monday afternoon in late May. Temperatures had varied from the mid-90s a couple weeks ago to the mid-50s. While preparing for the trip, I didn’t know whether to throw in ice cold beers or a thermos of coffee, so I took both. I also didn’t know whether the cold weather would ice the fishing. Instead it seemed to turn it red hot.

Josh and I cruised a natural edge of the lake, with weeds dropping off to deeper water on the left side of the boat as sand rose to docks and shore stations within casting distance on the right side. Luckily, the sun had come out, and as we tucked in the lee of the wind, it actually felt warm. I wasn’t the only one to think so. An enormous gar pike lazed inches from the surface, sunning itself in three feet of water above a sandbar. I had only seen pictures of them in books and magazines, but there was no mistaking the flat, bony spoonbill and the big dark camouflage splotches along its heavy body. Three of these amazing creatures graced us with their presence that day, but none of them showed the slightest interest in taking a lure.

The bass, on the other hand, showed more than enough interest. Josh caught the first one, a healthy mid-sized male. It gobbled up his brown rubber crayfish-like lure with a black lead head. The lure is officially named a Ned Rig by an optimistic brand — 10,000 Fish. Josh just calls it his Deadly Nedly. And it was.

A few minutes later we spotted a huge female that spooked from the boat. She cruised into deeper water and the cover of weeds. We stopped the boat and waited. In 10 minutes, she came back. Josh made a picture perfect cast, dropping the Deadly Nedly a few feet in front of her — close enough for her to notice but not right on her head.

She chased it and then abruptly pulled up, eyeing the lure with what appeared to be an equal mix of caution and interest as it settled motionless on the bottom. Josh deftly tipped his rod, just enough to give the rubber lure a crayfish-like shudder and the bass literally sucked it up off the bottom like a vacuum cleaner. The whole episode could have been recorded and presented in Advanced Smallmouth Tactics 201 classes across the country. I didn’t know whether the appropriate response was to clap giddily or kneel down and genuflect. Instead, I handed him a cold beer and a pretzel rod.

Not long after, I cast close to an empty shore station and turned to ask Josh another countless question when my spinnerbait was hit violently. The Berkley Lightning Rod that I had so lovingly cherished since middle school strained until I feared the microscopic bits of graphite composite would separate into whatever two or more pieces graphite composite is composited of.

Loaded with six-pound test line, I had definitely brought a knife to a gunfight. When it finally came to the boat, it was a smallmouth bass. Nothing more and nothing less. Not even an exceptionally large one. But I didn’t tell it that as I released it.

After all, it had all the right moves and muscle in all the right places. What more could an angler ask for?

With 27 years experience teaching all subjects to fourth and sixth grade students, Greg Frey is a jack of all trades and a master of none. With 52 years experience wandering around in the outdoors, his hunting and fishing skills follow a similar path.

Josh Bailey’s tackle box is basic. His reel is not.

Josh can throw anything he pulls out of his tackle box with a Shimano DC baitcasting reel. The DC stands for digital chip though when he flipped open a secret compartment on the side of the reel what I saw didn’t look like a chip but rather the inner workings of the Terminator.

Some sort of counterbalancing gizmo inside the reel made it virtually impossible to create a backlash (better known as a bird’s nest to anglers of the experienced generation). For a short period of time, I wanted to be Bill Dance. I quickly gave up on that dream when my brain and thumb couldn’t seem to coordinate their communication when operating baitcasting reels. My casts went half the distance of those with my open-faced spinning reel, and I spent more time untangling snarls of monofilament than reeling in crankbaits.

The Shimano DC solves that problem for you. A little switch tells the inner brains of the reel to adjust for different line types with different densities, stretch and friction. Setting one was for monofilament, setting two for fluorocarbon, setting three for braid, and Josh is still trying to figure out what setting four is for. He can toss lures with this reel farther, faster and with more accuracy than his open-faced spinning reels, though he uses those as well. At $250, it’s an expensive toy, but aren’t they all?

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