"He is talking about bass," says my wife.

Tony is teaching me how to fish.

More accurately, I am listening to him talk about catching fish. What I know about catching fish you could wrap in the Enquirer's sports section and still have room for Mrs. Paul's entire haddock crop. Crop? Whatever.

There are some things in sports that I've never understood, such as: When you need 7 yards for a first down, why do you throw a 6-yard pass? And, what is the attraction to fishing? You get up at some insane hour. You sit in a boat or stand on a shore, throw out a line and . . . and . . .

Occasionally, you re-bait your hook. If you are using live bait, this means impaling a worm or minnow or crayfish. On some deep-sea fishing excursions, some lucky individual will spoon some "chum" into the water. Chum is fish guts. What do you have to do to get that job, kill somebody?

Fishing makes baseball seem like a Vin Diesel movie. God help me if I ever actually caught a fish. I need sedatives when I get a splinter. A guy I know once caught a bluegill by hooking him through the eye.

Anyway, Tony Bean is a guest at the Travel, Sports and Boat Show, at the Cincinnati Convention Center. He is talking about catching smallmouth bass. Because it is January and boring and cold outside, I am listening. I like the Travel, Sports and Boat Show. I like that when it's January, somebody's handing you information on a Florida vacation. At one of the booths Sunday, they passed out little Zip-Loc bags of sand.

I like the boats that cost a million dollars and come with a bedroom as big as a closet. Because imagining is free, I imagine quitting my life and hiring a captain to take me on that boat to parasol drinks, and empty beaches where no one is hurling chum.

"I like a 3-inch grub," Tony says. That's a lure in the shape of an insect. "I like a big tail. I like a really soft plastic. That's all I fish with." I like watching the fish in the tank behind Tony. The striped ones are playing in air bubbles.

"Their favorite food is crawfish," Tony informs. "Their primary food is minnows. There's a whole lot more minnows swimmin' around than there are crawfish hanging around a rock. Ninety percent of all smallmouth are caught on or near the bottom. That's a fact."

Question: If 90 percent are caught at the bottom, why is their primary food swimming near the surface?

"If you can't feel the bait, you'll never feel the fish," Tony says. He has moved on. Tony recommends a 6-pound test line, because it's easier to feel the tug on the line. He likes a pole with "80 percent backbone" which is a sturdy pole, partly to compensate for the lighter line.

I think.

White jigs - little lures that look like bad lampshades - work well on smallmouth bass. They look like the white belly of a minnow. "You gotta trick 'em," Tony says.

How come? Fish are stupid. That's why they're fish, and we catch them instead of the other way around. Why not just skewer a few dead crayfish on a hook and see what happens?

Tony has moved on. "My hope is you don't break your jigs off."

Mine, too, cap'n. Mine, too.

---

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com