Baseball’s triple play, though rare, is a thing of beauty. Here’s one way it can be accomplished. The batter hits a hard line drive in the hole to the shortstop who stabs it, steps on second to catch the runner off base; then flips it to first before that runner can get back. Presto; you’ve just witnessed one of baseball’s most exciting plays.
You may not realize it but fishing can also feature a triple play. I know; because I once participated in one. My triple play took about four hours to complete but the results were just as exciting. Here’s what happened…
Eddie Halbrook, fishing guide and good friend, called me and invited me to join him for a fishing trip on Grand Bayou Lake near Coushatta.
“Man, I’m catching bass; catching crappie and finishing it up with some of the prettiest chinquapins you ever saw,” Halbrook announced. I cleared my calendar, the date was set and we were off to this pretty little 2,500 acre lake in Red River Parish.
After launching at the public ramp just prior to sunrise, Halbrook motored only a few hundred yards before switching on a gadget on the dash of his boat. It was a GPS that showed a slowly moving arrow (that was us) approaching a dot on the chart.
“The dot represents one of my brush piles; I marked it as a way point on my GPS which makes it easy to get back to. We’ll be within three feet of the top when we get there,” said Halbrook.
Once the arrow representing the boat and the dot representing the brush pile were aligned, Halbrook tossed out a marker, handed me a jig pole with a Stinger jig and Berkeley Crappie Nibble added with instructions to fish near the buoy. “You’ll feel the brush down there,”
he added. He was right. About the time I bumped brush, I felt a tap on the line, set the hook and was soon fighting a medium-sized black crappie. In short order, we caught several more before Halbrook announced we needed to move on to try our luck with bass. Before leaving the brush pile, Halbrook hooked and landed a 3 pound channel catfish that hit his crappie jig.
Next, we moved to a cove where the bass had been schooling earlier in the week. A steady breeze had the surface churned to the point that we saw very little surface schooling activity. Not to be outdone, Halbrook handed me a rod he had rigged, Carolina-style, with a 6 inch watermelon finesse worm. Half an hour later, we counted four bass we had landed with one being just above the 17 inch slot; the others just below it.
“Now,” Halbrook said as he started the engine, “the fun is about to begin. Have you ever caught chinquapin bream in the middle of summer?” I hadn’t and was anxious to give it a try.
Again, Halbrook flipped on his GPS and we motored slowly up to another “dot” on the chart. “This is where the chinquapins are hanging out. They feed on freshwater mussels and there are lots of them here on this flat.”
He was right. Less than a minute after tossing my hook, skewered with a cold worm into eight foot water, the float shuddered and slid beneath the surface. It was a fine chinquapin,fat as could be. By the time an hour had passed, we put about 35 big chinquapins in the box. Thus, our triple play was completed with a catfish added as an extra, and we did it all between sunrise and noon.
A baseball triple play is a fun thing to watch. However, I was as excited to participate in a fishing triple play as watching the short stop complete one in Yankee Stadium.