When the Fog Lifted

The predawn chill bit through my flannel shirt as I stepped onto the dock, my boots echoing like shotgun blasts in the sleeping marina. Lake Erie's infamous fog swallowed the horizon whole - visibility barely twenty feet. I patted the worn lucky spinnerbait in my tackle box, its skirt frayed from last season's smallmouth battles.

'You're nuts,' my buddy Jake had yawned when I texted him the launch coordinates. But I knew smallmouths staged near the rock reefs this time of year, their bronze flanks flashing through cabbage weeds.

First three casts yielded nothing but phantom strikes. The cold numbed my fingers until I barely felt the line. Then - a tug so violent it almost wrenched the rod from my hands. 'Holy Toledo!' The drag screamed like a tea kettle as something massive bulldogged toward deep water. For ten heart-stopping minutes, the fog transformed into a silver curtain hiding my adversary. When the smallmouth finally surfaced, its jaw gaped wide enough to swallow a beer can, gills flaring crimson against dawn's first light.

Releasing the 21-inch beast, I noticed the fog had burned off entirely. Sunlight glittered on the calm water where moments before, an invisible war had raged. Sometimes the lake doesn't give up its secrets - it lets you earn them.