When Kojak's striped bass report didn't pan out, Jack Raymond hopped the bank and found fast largemouth action in a hidden oxbow.

Jack pointed out a beach with a natural berm behind it and an eagle on top of a headless cabbage palm surveying his domain. We shot the canoe up onto the sand and then had to remember how to stand up. Stretching my legs and delighted to be off the cramped, canoe butt holder, no longer worried about swamping and losing my camera, I sat down on a cabbage palm root ball and peeled an orange while Jack disappeared over the rise.

Nothing magnifies the virtues of contentment so well as the relief of escaping adversity. Leaning against the palm trunk, dropping the occasional orange section into my smiling mouth in the dappled shade of a beautiful day on the St. John’s, immune to the ravages of the boat traffic, I was absolutely inert, comfortable and satisfied with life, and could not imagine moving, even to catch fish. So naturally here comes Jack back.

“You’ve got to see this,” he earnestly tells a person who wouldn’t budge if a Broadway musical with free hot dogs and beer were going on over there.

“Whatever it is, it can wait a couple hours. This is too perfect to risk.”

I couldn’t imagine what could be so consarned important for me to see, but he wouldn’t let it rest, couldn’t stand to see me happy. Finally with the greatest regret I slowly stood up and walked away from that spot, that feeling, that all so rare merger with the universe and it was like I was saying good-bye forever to a good friend. “This better be good,” I emphasized.

Well, I have to admit, it was. As I walked over the berm from the narrow corridor of the boat-choked main river, I saw an entirely different, unsuspected realm, and stepping down the other side, entered a different world of natural tranquility, pastoral beauty, vast green expanses, big blue sky, lily pads and dead calm water. And no, count ’em, zero people, or any evidence there ever had been any.

So, to heck with comfort anyway. I returned briskly to the canoe and got my medium rod and a box of lures. What we had here, that my clever buddy remembered from years ago, was an oxbow lake of sorts, a bit of the river left over when it changed course, effectively disconnected and entirely out of sight. “Were there bass in it?” was the question we had to investigate, “or was it shallow and filled up with decaying plants, silt and mudfish?”

Jack tossed a jerkbait straight out and we both watched it get nailed on the surface between some pads. As he pulled a small bass across the vegetation, he couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself if he’d just given birth to alligators. “I guess there’s bass in here,” he chortled. “You glad you got up?”

“Yeah. Nothing makes me happier than seeing you catch a fish,” I said, tossing a Beetle Spin down the side.

I worked my way down to the left where there was some surface action and Jack went right. At the back end of the rectangular lake large swirls were pushing water just beyond some cattails and lily pads, which usually means tilapia these days. It looked like classic gar and mudfish water, but I had stumbled upon bedding bass and one of them grabbed my spinner. That brought Jack on the run and between us we hooked several big bass though landing only one 3-pounder. We got bass along the whole perimeter, including a 4-pounder that smashed my purple speckled worm at the edge of some grass. It was a surrealistic experience, constantly hearing the roar of the motorized world like it was just sound effects, thoroughly separated and undetectable from it. While other fishermen raced around after bass in their water rockets, we had these at our leisure.

We could have stayed the rest of the day there. In fact, it being midday and the worst fishing time, I could have returned to the cabbage palm to resurrect my former state of bliss or at least taken a nap and fished the pond later, because if it was that good at noon, I wanted to see it at dusk. But we really didn’t wish to paddle back in the dark so we moved on to other backwaters and sloughs between there and the ramp, that being our new pattern for the day.