If you have never spent a night fishing, you have missed something.  You can’t imagine how bad you can feel at five or six a.m. if you haven’t ever been fishing all night! 
Bass boat owners like to fish the lakes at night in the summer with jig and pork combinations or plastic worms.  I have done a great deal of that and it produces some good bass. 
My uncle Norten loves it, because back in his youth, which was so long ago we still had radio, he caught so many huge largemouth at night, and he guided clients who paid well because they caught big fish.  That’s how come he is so rich today.
I like fishing for stripers at night in the late winter, or early spring, and I do enjoy feeling a bass pick up a jig-and-pork lure in the darkness on a summer night, but I never once guided fishermen on a lake at night for bass, like Uncle Norten did. I like having my foot on a trolling motor less than I enjoy having my hand on a boat paddle. 
 I did, however, guide for fishermen on Ozark streams at night, in July and August.  None of them even looked for a jig or plastic lure on those occasions.  They only used one thing….. an Arbogast jitterbug, and the bigger the better.   After all, a bass that came after a jitterbug at night could engulf a big one very easily.
I always knew that someone who wanted to catch a big bass, and had never caught one, could have the experience of doing just that on a stream at night with a jitterbug.  The lures took little effort to cast, and they were very simple to work.  You didn’t have to see them, you just listened.  If they were making that ‘bloop-bloop-bloop’ noise on the surface, they were working properly, and there would be, in a matter of time, a tremendous commotion on the surface.
Often, when I am fishing top-water lures this time of year, usually a popper or a buzz spin or maybe even a top-water minnow, there is no big commotion on the surface when a bass takes that lure.  They just sort of suck it under and you set the hook to get an idea of what you have.  A big bass of five or six pounds may often take the lure under without much of splash.  But that isn’t the case with a jitterbug after dark.  A big bass, and a three-pound-or-better smallmouth falls into that category, will just absolutely tear up the surface when he takes a jitterbug.
 A fisherman who has been lulled into a feeling of peaceful serenity by the night and the calm and the quiet will nearly jump out of his seat if a bass takes his jitterbug only a few feet from the boat.  It’s like a big rock has been thrown off a nearby bluff.  
Sometimes a bass will smash at a jitterbug two or three times before he finally gets it.  I have had them miss it twenty feet away, fifteen feet away, ten feet away, and then nail it about four feet from the boat.  At such times, you had better have your drag set properly or you will have your line broken by the savagery of it.
 Just the other night we found bass packed into a stretch of current in the dusky final light of day, and they were clobbering everything we cast into it.  It made me realize that I need to come back there just below that shoal with a jitterbug, and I intend to do that.  There will be lunkers there in the darkness, prowling the slowing current.  There are growing numbers of fishermen out on the lake now at night.  I’ll be the only one back up that river with a jitterbug.
That recent evening, in a little backwater slough, I watched a fisherman so intent on what he was doing he didn’t even notice me.  I have seen many of them before, fishing along our streams and lakes, drawing the ire of some anglers who think they are too efficient at what they do, and a threat to some species of fish.
This one was doing things differently than I have seen them do it before.  He was a great blue heron, with both feet on a small knob which stuck up out of the water only about eight or ten inches above the surface.  Herons are wading birds, and he looked a little strange situated on that snag like a well-formed statue, frozen in place, leaning forward with his neck curved to form an S, his beak forward and eyes glued to the water before him. He was crouched, with his legs bent, and not teetering in the slightest.  What balance, I thought to myself… wish I could do that!
He was mesmerized by the prey he was watching, and in a matter of less than a minute, he struck, quickly and efficiently.  His head went completely beneath the water, and he maintained his place on that knob, coming up with a six- or eight-inch fish of some kind, most likely a small bass.  He just stood there for a moment, straightening his body a little but with legs still bent and body forward, and then he went about swallowing his meal.
Faintly I could hear my grandfather’s voice from way back in another time and place along the river of my boyhood.  “Danged crane,” he was saying… “there’s another bass that won’t never see the frying pan.”
No doubt about it, there are too many herons today to suit most people, though I doubt that any of us besides the Creator himself can come up with the number there should be.  Folks who have fish farms think one is too many.  And us fishermen can’t stand anything that eats fish we like to catch, like herons and otters.  It is a shame we are so tolerant of the destruction of our streams by those who cut and clear and clean and bulldoze.  It is a shame there are so many who actually think gravel dredging is good for the streams.  How did good people, intelligent people, become so ignorant of what has destroyed our creeks and rivers?
How is it that we do not know… the spreading of billions of gallons of sludge and sewage on our watersheds does things to our streams that creates a loss of living things which thousands of herons could never equal?  How is it that we can’t figure out that the filling of deep eddies and the covering of rocks and boulders with sand and gravel for hundreds of miles can not be alleviated by allowing people to get into the stream with dredging equipment here and there?   THAT’S IN LARGE PART WHAT CAUSED IT!
That being said, it would be so much easier to shoot the herons and the otters than to tackle those other problems.  And a few rotting carcasses along the river won’t exactly effect the water quality today, will it?
 Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@alltel.net.  If you need a sort of outdoor oriented speaker at any event which does not require too much of a serious attitude, contact me.
www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.