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Fishing Stories from Ned Kehde |
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Submitted by Ned Kehde - June 30, 2000 For the last two years, as long as the weather isn't extremely unruly, Roy Benjamin of Emporia has been catching fish galore. And that's a miracle. For there was a fairly long spell during the past 19 years when the battery of doctors who were continually poking at and examining a variety of Benjamin's vital organs wouldn't have given him a ghost of a chance to be alive today. And if he were alive, his existence would be so encumbered by so many life-support systems that it would be impossible for him fish. In the fact, the prognoses became so grim in 1993 that Benjamin sold his big bass boat. But Benjamin's life was saved by the combination of divine miracles and good physicians. Now at the age of 61, diabetes is his only affliction, which is only a minor burden when compared to the multitude of maladies that plagued him. So his life began anew, and he owns a small bass boat and fishes every day but Saturday and Sunday. Before his heart, lungs, liver, colon and prostate went haywire, Benjamin was a force in the Kansas bass tournament scene. Even in the midst of his spats with ill health, he won the title the Kansas B.A.S.S. Federation Mr. Bass title in 1988. In his heydays, he fished more than 30 tournaments a year, and he frequently finished at or close to the top of the leaderboard at the Redman and other regional tournaments at waterways in Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri and New Mexico. For several years, he even tested the big waters of the B.A.S.S. invitational circuit, but never finished higher than 48th place. In addition, he founded Emporia's bass club in 1975 and held a variety of leadership roles in organizations that promoted bass fishing in Kansas. For years, Benjamin called Melvern his home lake; he fished it before it opened in 1974, and he won the last bass tournament held there. Back in Melvern's prime, he constantly caught 125 or more largemouth bass a day, but today Benjamin is fortunate to catch 10 bass on the best of days. So nowadays he seldom fishes at Melvern; instead he goes to Coffey County Lake or Gridley Lake, where he can catch a variety of fish and a lot of them. He says that Coffey is a testimony to what good management and catch-and-release fishing can do for a lake. Gridley, however, is a young lake that is yet to be abused by plunderous fishermen. Benjamin is no longer addicted to the largemouth bass; he enjoys tangling with white bass, walleye, wipers, crappie, catfish and most especially the smallmouth bass. In 1999, for example, he spent 45 days at Coffey pursuing channel cats, and he caught 1100 of them, and the biggest weighed 32 pounds. His favorite time to fish at Coffey is in May, when he casts jigs to the smallmouths and big crappie spawning along the riprap. To fish Coffey, Benjamin says, an angler must learn how to deal with the wind. And the best way to do that is to drift and troll. In bass fishing circles trolling is blasphemy, and bass tournaments prohibit it. But at Coffey, Benjamin spends many hours trolling for smallmouths. On a recent afternoon, for instance, Benjamin and a friend trolled, using spinning tackle that sported either a 1/4-ounce Chomper's Stand Up Jighead and a skirted grub or a Lunker City 1/8-ounce Fin-S jighead and a four-inch black Berkley Power Worm. By dusk, they caught 37 smallmouths and white bass in two to six feet of water on windy points. And he employed a similar technique to win the Governor's Classic at Coffey on June 7, proving that he remains a force Kansas bass fishing circles. |
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