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WALKERTOWN -- Someone once described a fisherman as a hook at one end and a fool at the other, and that's as apt a definition as any.

Why else would I be standing in the afternoon sun on the banks of a pond with no name, sweat pouring off me while I held a broken reel and listened to my fishing buddy across the water keeping score.

"That's nine!," he said, peering into the mouth of a one-pounder trying to pry a hook out of the inside of a bass that had just digested a plastic worm.

It's 114 degrees, and I'm fishing with a guy I call the Bass Surgeon because of the complex operations he has to perform almost every time he catches a fish. Which by about 5:30 p.m. had reached nine surgeries to my none. He was even using my needle-nose pliers.

The pond we sometimes fish is only visible by airplane or Mapquest, so it would be fruitless to try and describe where it is. Suffice to say, it's near some train tracks, and that's about all I'm willing to say.

The phone call from the Surgeon came at just the right time. I'd broken two drivers in one week, so golf was on temporary hold. The lawn was mown, the boss was out of town and I had nowhere to be. I grabbed my spinning rod, slung my tackle box over my shoulder and headed to the pond with no name.

When I got there he was already sitting on the bank pulling a worm from the mouth of a fish he'd been playing for several minutes.

No one fishes like the Surgeon. He allows the bass to inhale the bait before he sets the hook, then spends several more minutes trying to get the hook out without killing the poor fish. He has an amazing success rate and probably knows the innards of a largemouth bass better than anyone I know.

My first cast went about 10 feet and made an awful noise, the sound of ball bearings and stripped gears. After a few more casts I went to the tackle box and changed reels. The secret to pond fishing is adaptability.

While I worked on my rod, the Bass Surgeon tied on a rooster tail, a bait designed for catching shellcrackers or English breakfast bream, certainly not bass.

After a few minutes, the scoreboard started lighting up again.

"That's 14!" the Surgeon said about the time my second reel came apart in my hands. I remembered then that it came apart the last time I went pond fishing, which was why it was stuffed back in the box to begin with.

My last un-used reel was a baitcaster for slinging crankbaits 1,000 yards across a reservoir, not for trying to flip a worm alongside a stump 30 feet away.

"That's 15!" the Surgeon yelled as he extracted a rooster tail from the gizzard of a stunned bass.

I tied on a Mann's 30+ deep-diving hooknest and threw it completely across the pond. The water exploded when it hit. Any fish within 100 yards immediately swam away. I shook my head and mumbled cuss words as I adjusted the drag and the tension and looked at my upside-down spinning rod with the baitcaster mounted on the wrong side and 80-pound test or something spooled out across the tiny little pond with no name while the Surgeon reeled in another one on a lure smaller than a dime, one that looked, quite frankly, a little feminine.

"That's 16!" he said. Birds were beginning to gather a round him, a killdeer circling above, a great blue heron flying noisily onto a pine branch, Canada geese and mallards making awkward touchdowns on the open water. He didn't notice. He was too busy operating on another one-pounder, making the delicate maneuvers required to extract a lure from a bass gullet, then gently tossing the fish back into the water while the birds complained.

I watched all this from across the pond as I reeled in my giant lure. Suddenly I heard the drag scream and saw the lure go under. The reel continued to make the noise only a baitcaster can make when it's holding back a lunker. Or when the drag is set too free and the line is spooling into a mess and retrieving it is suddenly out of the question. I changed hands and tried to increase the pull and fiddle with all the other contraptions on the sides of my $200 reel as the fish came to a stop in the water.

I reached out my hand and just grabbed the line and pulled him in without the rod.

He weighed about as much as my lure. My hand was bleeding. I looked across the water, and the Surgeon was watching me. He was holding another bass.

"That's 18!" he said.

"Seventeen," I mumbled.

"What?" he asked, smiling as he opened the jaws of another patient and deftly inserted my needle-nose pliers into the bass.

"Nothing," I said to myself. "I didn't say anything."

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com