Editor’s Note: After compiling some of the best fish stories from our female fishing fans over the last month or so, FLWOutdoors.com is finally ready to share them with the public. For the next several weeks, we’ll feature a different submission every week, with articles being posted on Mondays. To be sure, the stories submitted by our readers have been most impressive as well – ranging from the truly humorous to the utterly heartbreaking. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did. And hopefully, as more and more women get involved in the wonderful sport of fishing, we’ll get to read and hear about many more stories from our female fans in the future. Enjoy.
Sylvia Murray
Royal, Ark.
Life goes better with bass fishing
I was 12 when I went on my first fishing trip with my family. We caught crappies using Zebco rods and reels and “mostly” live minnows for bait. After cleaning the fish for my mother to cook, I was hooked on the excitement of catching fish. Since I grew up in West Texas, where the closest body of water was a two-hour drive, I did not get a chance to really pursue fishing until I was in my mid-20s and had moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
My coworkers in the City of Dallas Engineering Design Department were avid anglers who constantly spoke about their fishing adventures, which fueled my desire to fish again. When I won $1,000 on a local radio contest, I told the deejay I was going to use the money to buy a bass boat! With the support of Jack Brim, my fishing buddy, I read, watched and absorbed everything I could about bass fishing. Within two years, I joined the local Dallas Bass’n Gals chapter to improve my skills through competition.
While at a boat show recruiting women to fish Bass’n Gals, I met the catch of a lifetime. Bobby Murray holds the title of winner of the first BassMasters Classic Championship, so it made sense that our honeymoon consisted of stopping at the BassMaster Classic Championship that year in North Carolina. We pulled our bass boat up the East Coast and fished “Golden Pond” – Lake Winnipesaukee, N.H., then we went on to Lovesick Lake in Ontario, Canada, for some great smallmouth bass fishing.
After fishing hundreds of places, Bobby says he can remember where he caught most of his fish. I once told a friend that I couldn’t teach them how to fish, that “”the fish showed you how to fish when you felt the tug on your line.” Most of us can remember how our first fish and biggest fish felt on the end of our line. It’s the desire to repeat that great feeling of a bass tugging on our line that makes anglers eternal optimists and makes us want to cast just “one more time.” You can have a slow day of fishing, but when you catch a bass, the entire day feels better.
Nearly everyone I have met in the fishing industry has been a positive influence on my life. They say that “people forget what you say or what you do, but they don’t forget how you make them feel.” My motto: “Go fishing.” It will make you feel good all over.