When the Fog Lifted

3:47AM showed on my dashboard clock as headlights cut through pea-soup fog. The familiar walnut smell of my grandfather's tackle box mixed with gasoline fumes from the outboard motor – smells that always made my right shoulder twitch with anticipation. I patted the 复合旋转亮片 in my shirt pocket, its hooks carefully wrapped in coffee shop napkins like silverware in a five-star restaurant.

Dawn broke as gray as old dishwater. My first cast sent concentric rings pulsing through oil-slick calm waters. By the third hour, even the herons had stopped laughing at my empty cooler. The sun burned through the fog just as I considered eating the leftover nightcrawlers for lunch.

That's when I saw them – nervous water dimples moving counterclockwise against the current. My hands shook threading a new leader, remembering how Charlie from the bait shop swore by 氟碳线 for clear conditions. The strike came not as a tug, but as if the lake itself grabbed my rod butt.

What followed was less a fight than a negotiation. The smallmouth breached twice, tail-walking across the surface like it owed me rent money. When I finally lipped it, rainbow scales stuck to my wedding band where the fog had condensed into droplets.

The fish darted back into the gloom, leaving me with a hook-shaped scratch across my thumb and the realization that fog doesn't lift – it just moves somewhere else to complicate another angler's morning.