Early morning wiper fun

My children hate me.  They stay up late even if I put them to bed early.  They wake up screaming in the middle of the night.  They climb into my bed if there's a moth haunting their room.  In other words, sleep is hard to come by some nights, and last night was particularly cruel. 

After a night like that, I wake up a little...shall we say...surly.  And I'm not talking Surly but more like surly.

Anyway, as I showered away some of my insomniastic rage, I decided to go fishing instead of heading straight to work.  With everyone else in the house slumbering at 6:15 AM, I headed for the spillway to wet a hook.  I found a decent spot near the current and started casting my Zoom Super Fluke but got hung up in the rocks.  As you can imagine, this didn't improve my mood at all.

I searched high and low through my tackle, but I didn't find anything vaguely similar to use.  What I did run across though was an Offshore Angler striper jig (basically, a white bucktail with a pink jig head) from back in my NJ days.

I didn't know how well this 1 oz piece of lead would work in fresh water, but there was only one way to find out.  After a couple of casts to get the feel of it, I tossed the jig into the current and hooked up with a big ol' water donkey!  He was a fighter too.  I would reel him in a few yards just to have him peel line back off, screaming drag as he went.  The tug of war went on for a while, but eventually, I landed the lunker with my trusty net.

I don't know how big he was (I need to get a fish scale one of these days), but he was too long to fully fit in the selfie.

At this point, my day had turned around.  I let the wiper go, dried my hands, and packed up my gear.  I even made it to work by 7 AM.  Not a bad way to start the day after all.