The rod tip twitched, and I leaned forward, heart kicking. Three rods were set, the lines cutting into the dark water under the bridge, and the bubbles were rising like a jacuzzi. “Here we go,” I said. “Come on, fishy.
”
The left rod was on the corn, the middle on the boilie, and the right one on the pop-up. The poll was live in the chat—which rod catches the first fish. People were guessing, betting chump change, and I was just trying not to embarrass myself in front of the toddler who was apparently watching. The bubbles kept coming up.
There’s no way that’s from the dam, I thought. That’s feeding activity. Something’s down there. “You guys see those bubbles?
” I asked. “Clear as day, right under the bridge, off to the right. ”
Someone in chat joked about crop dusting the carp, and I laughed. The smell of the water always hits ten times harder when it comes out of the river anyway, so the joke landed.
I had a good feeling about this spot. The last time I fished this stretch, I landed about five or six fish, including a respectable catfish that went four or five pounds. This time I hadn’t chummed the water up, but I’d thrown a few balls of groundbait over each rod before I settled in. The boilies were on there, the corn was on there, and the rigs were placed right along the ten-foot drop-off.
Now it was just a waiting game. The chat was moving. People were coming home from work, making dinner, feeding their kids, and settling in to watch me sit next to a rod. It was a good community.
A guy named Hungry had just subscribed, and I thanked him while I watched the rod tips. The wind was picking up a little, and it made me nervous with the alarms on high sensitivity. The lines were far out of the water, so a hard gust could set them off for no reason. A while back, I’d actually gone through the trouble of recording my own alarm tones through my condenser mic—I took a rod, ran it across each alarm, and set a different tone for each rod.
The left one was high-pitched, the middle one you already heard, and the right one was the low tone. That way, when I was sitting there, I knew exactly which rod was going off just by the sound. If I could hear it over the wind, that is. The alert system had been a problem earlier.
I tested a trailer for my channel page, spent maybe ten or twelve dollars on some free music and whipped it up in about fifteen minutes. I was pretty proud of it, actually. Then I played it on stream and blasted everyone’s eardrums because the audio came through my mic at full volume. My phone was vibrating in the chat, people were telling me to turn it down, and I was sitting there with my cheeks clenched.
“Sorry, guys, I didn’t realize it was going to be that loud,” I said, turning it off. It was a small thing, but it got me thinking about the setup again. I’ve been considering wearing an earpiece just so the alerts don’t play through the microphone, but then the stream wouldn’t hear the high-quality audio. I don’t know if it’s possible or not.
I kept coming back to it between casts. The wind was picking up more, and the conversation drifted to the new Starlink I’d just gotten. Officially had it set up with the 300-gig plan. I planned to take it to Pennsylvania this weekend, fish the Allegheny River for the first time.
It’s less than four hours away. I was testing it at home, getting about sixteen to twenty megs up, sometimes dipping down to ten. Good enough for a 1080p stream at six thousand bitrate. At least I hoped.
There was an Airbnb I was staying at, and I was pretty sure the backyard butted right up against the river. Within a hundred feet. That meant I could do a cooking stream from there. Tomorrow night I was planning to hit the grocery store and pick up some beans.
We always did the beans. It was a whole thing on the channel. “It’s only like 80 degrees here,” I said, reading the chat. “Someone said it’s a hundred over there?
That’s wild. I’d be cooking. ”
I was in the loft with the computers running, so I had the AC on. Mine was getting old—about seventeen years old now.
It had a pinhole leak or something, and every few years it needed a refill. The refill cost a few hundred bucks. One company tried to charge me eight hundred dollars just to do the service call and the refrigerant. The other company, the one Kelly referred from her work, was cheaper and actually showed up on time.
I’d probably stick with them. But eventually I was going to have to bite the bullet and replace the whole thing—condenser, air handler, all of it. Five or six thousand dollars, if I was lucky. “You lasted twenty-three years with yours, that’s pretty good,” I said to the chat.
“Mine’s just running on borrowed time. ”
I looked back at the water. The bubbles were still coming up, right there under the bridge. Something was feeding.
“Come on, fish,” I said. “Find the hook bait. ”
I remembered the last pike trip. That was the one that wrecked my ankle.
I wore those muck boots for six or seven hours, and ever since, my ankle was just stiff and broken. I was cutting a rug a little too hard, is what I told the chat, and they laughed at the old saying. One guy in chat said he’d never heard that expression before, and I called him out for being too old not to know it. The line was still.
The wind was howling a bit, but the alarms weren’t going off—yet. I kept watching the rod tips. The bubbles were starting to move, drifting toward the middle rod. I held my breath.
Hitting a deer is my biggest fear when I drive at night. I know it’s going to happen eventually on these roads. Someone in chat said they never hit a deer, the deer hit them, ran right into the side of the car. “What?
” I laughed. “Just ran into your car? Where were you, on a path? ”
Then I stopped laughing.
The middle rod tip slammed down, and the alarm screamed a high-pitched tone. I was already grabbing the rod before the sound even finished. “Fish on,” I said, standing up. “That’s the boilie rod.
”
The line was peeling out, and the fight was on. I leaned back, set the hook harder, and felt the weight on the other end. The chat was spamming, the poll was decided, and I was grinning like an idiot.
The toddler was watching, and I wasn’t about to mess this up.
