Then a few years ago a three-pound smallmouth bass was caught, and when the lucky angler brought his catch to the Department of Fish and Game for examination, panic ensued. After the first botched poisoning effort, the Department's official line had been that the alien species were all warm water fish that would thrive only in the shallow water of the Keys, so there was no threat to Lake Tahoe itself. Smallmouth prefer colder water though, and it was thought that they would establish themselves in the lake and compete with existing game fish species. A massive electro-shocking program throughout the Keys' extensive labyrinth of docks and lagoons turned up hundreds of largemouth, state-record class crappies, and a few rainbow and brown trout, but not a single small mouth was found!

Your tax dollars at work my friends, but at least the DFG relaxed and stopped looking for fish to kill... until now. The stories of stripers in the keys were just that, with the only additional report coming from a charter captain who told me he hooked an eight-pound striper on a live minnow while fishing for mackinaw off south shore last winter, at the deepwater-drop in front of the Keys. He told me to keep this information to myself, as he also fears that the lake will be poisoned, and although this captain catches quite a few trophy mackinaw and brown trout, he's also been known to claim having spotted huge sturgeon and seventy-pound lake trout while out on the water, so he understandably did not want to risk ridicule from those who would accuse him of telling another whopper.

He told me he released the striper anyway, so I really had nothing to go on until my friend John Shaw called me last week and told me he was catching stripers in the Keys sailing lagoon. John lives right next to this lagoon, and in early spring he fishes it for rainbow and brown trout, which travel into the Keys each year when the water is cold. In summer he targets largemouth, so I knew he wasn't mistaking this 'bass-with-a-stripe' for actual striped bass, but he's also one to have a few beers and tell stories (he has a jackalope mounted on his wall), so I just shined him on- "Okay buddy, if you bring one home, give me a call."

Then last night, he called me at ten p.m., his voice frantic. "Get over here now, and bring your camera!" He's done this sort of thing before, and last year I took a photo of a fat, five-pound brown trout he caught on a night crawler, so I drove across town to his house to find him in the kitchen holding a big striped bass. "Whaddaya say now, sucker?" he shouted.

"I say you've been striper fishing in the Delta or the Sacramento River, and you're going a little far for a joke." But he was adamant, and surprisingly did not appear to have been drinking.

"I was soaking worms for trout, you know, like I always do in that lagoon when the ice breaks up, and I started seeing all these big splashes on the surface. I cast some trout lures out but I couldn't get a bite, so I figured they were largemouth and I tried a Hula-Popper. Wham! I caught two little stripers, then this one, and I lost an even bigger one!"

"When, this afternoon?" I asked, still playing along.

"No, just now, like an hour ago, it's night fishing! I'm just going to change into warmer clothes and I'm going back. You HAVE to come with me. They're stripers, they move around, by tomorrow they could be gone out of the lagoon!" My friend was nearly in a frenzy, and I began to suspect he was either under the influence of something stronger than alcohol, or was really serious.

"Isn't night fishing illegal on Tahoe?" I asked innocently.

"Number one, who cares, number two, I talked to Fish and Game last year when I was catching those brown trout after dark and they told me this lagoon is so far back they don't consider it part of the lake proper. Dude, this is big, I mean BIG! Give me one hour, you can fish a night crawler for the damn trout if you want, but I'm fishing stripers!"

"Well, I have my fishing license and one rod in the truck, but it's a trout rod with six-pound line. I don't think I'll be catching any big stripers on that."

"I have a bass rod for you with twelve-pound, come on!" So we grabbed our gear, took two flashlights, and went out his back door, then walked through his yard to a path that wound through a thick stand of mountain willow, to the edge of the sailing lagoon. A quarter-moon gave the slightest, silvery illumination to the water. "Now, SHHH! Just listen!" Johnny said, but I ignored him and clamped the flashlight in my teeth so I could tie a slip-sinker rig on my trout rod.

"I don't hear any splashing." I said as I opened his backpack and found the tub of night crawlers.

"Just wait." He replied, and then there was plenty of splashing as he cast out his Hula-Popper again and again, without a bite. While my night crawler soaked, my patience wore thin, and after half an hour, I was ready to leave. Just then, as his lure lay motionless on the surface, the water around it erupted and he was onto a good fish.

"What is it?" I shouted as I watched him work the fish in, then scoop it into his long-handled net.

"Bummer." John replied as he reached down and lip-grabbed a beautiful largemouth of four or five pounds! Quite a catch, and as I photographed it I started thinking about the story I would write on largemouth bass fishing in the Keys.

"So you went striper fishing somewhere, brought one home, then set up this whole gag just to get me out here, so you could show me a largemouth. What was the point? I would have come out just for the largemouth, buddy."

Just then, the trout rod I had propped up on a forked stick nearly flew into the water before I could grab it. The reel's drag whined as line flew off the spool and the rod bucked hard in my hand. Zzzip! Zzzip! Snap! "Whoa," I said weakly, "what do you think that was?"

"I don't know," said John, "but they're hitting on the surface now, just like I told you. I don't have another Hula Popper; try the Jitterbug, I have it tied on the other bass rod." So we cast out these two top water bass plugs toward the splashes we could hear and just barely see out in the middle of the lagoon. "You need to let the lure just sit for about ten seconds, then twitch it." As he did so, another fish inhaled the lure. "There we go, now we'll see if it's a striper." This fish came in quickly on the stout bass gear, and rather than using the net, he swung a small striped bass up onto the bank!

"NO WAY!" I shouted. I was looking at it, but I still couldn't believe it! Striped bass in the Tahoe Keys! "Let me get a picture; don't let that thing flop back in the water. Here, take my rod." I had nearly forgotten my Jitterbug plug was still sitting out there in the middle of the lagoon, and when I decided I should just quickly reel in before taking the photo of John's striper, I turned the reel handle a single crank and was shocked by an explosion on the water! "What the hell was that?" I asked, and was quickly answered by a tremendous yank on my rod!

"Whatever it is, it just ate your lure! Keep your rod tip up!" For several seconds it thrashed wildly at the surface, then dove and began peeling the twelve-pound line off the reel in rapid spurts. Four times I turned it and horsed it toward the bank, and each time it powered back into the center of the lagoon before John could get the net under it. The fifth time it came close we saw a huge, white form beneath the surface and I handed John the rod then plunged into the frigid water up to my waist.

"Get his head up!" I screamed as I pushed my way through a floating mass of dead, brown milfoil. I could no longer see the fish, but then there was its head, as big as mine, out of the water and shaking violently from side to side. Just as it paused, the line snapped, John fell over backwards and I thrust both thumbs into its mouth, clamping my fingers under its jaw and hauling it up in a double-handed lip-grab.

"Get the camera! Get the camera!" I demanded as I stumbled up the bank, shivering hard. I held the struggling striper up for several photos, then made John show me them on the digital camera's monitor before I lowered the fish back into the water.

"What are you doing?" he cried, eyes wide. "That thing must be twenty-five pounds! It'll be the lake record, now that we've proven there's stripers in here! And we need to take these to Fish and Game, so they believe us! Hey, where'd that little one go? Dang, I think it did flop back into the water. Well, at least I have that other one at home. Dude, I'm serious, don't put that fish back!"

I paused, holding the giant striper by the lip again and moving it back and forth in the water to flare its gills and revive it. "Okay Johnny, let's take it to Fish and Game, then how long do you think it'll be before they poison your lagoon, probably the whole Keys, and maybe even the whole lake?"

"Uh, I hadn't thought of that."

"Well I have! Word is going to get out about this soon enough anyway; you know I'm going to have to write an article about it, and other people are going to start catching stripers anyway, but until Fish and Game has proof, they won't start poisoning, and this fish has a chance to make it out into the lake, where they'll probably never find it. You need to go home and eat yours, to destroy the evidence. Maybe stripers are bad for the lake, but poison is worse, and just picture trolling a Rapala for trout and catching another one of these!" With that I let the fish go and it swam lazily out of sight.

"Oh my God, what time is it?" John asked. I looked at my glow-in-the-dark watch face.

"Eleven fifty-five, why?" "Think about it, five more minutes and we would have had to say we caught that striper on April Fools' Day, then who would have believed us?"

APRIL FOOLS!!!

Until next time,
Mark (never stand in a canoe) Wiza
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