It’s not unusual for a day on the water to provide some unexpected events, when fish bite on a lure presented in an unusual way, or be in a place where you might not figure them to be.

It’s the lack of predictability that makes fishing so appealing. If we could always correctly anticipate how things would go, the suspense would be gone, and the activity would lose much of its attraction to me, as I suspect it would for many of you.

A recent after-hours trip to Keystone Lake serves as an example. With the full moon upon us, my buddy Sid Brown and I met at the ramp an hour or so before dark. Our plan was to focus on the night bite for some over-sized bass, with just enough time before the sun set to get in position.

I took a “hero or zero” approach, taking a bare minimum of baits, ones I felt offered a good chance at duping better-than-average sized bass. Pre-rigged rods included a couple of large topwater lures, a big Colorado spinnerbait, a seven-inch fluke-style soft jerkbait, and a 10-inch plastic worm rigged Texas-style.

Sid opted for a smaller spinnerbait with a soft swimbait trailer and a lipless “Ratt L Trap” type crankbait, the latter having been particularly productive during a prior trip to the lake, a daytime outing where he was able to coax some largemouths out of the weedbeds.

Even after the sun went down, a persistent breeze ruffled the surface. If any bass were aware of my topwater offerings on the broken surface, they ignored them. The 10-inch worm triggered a couple hits, but they didn’t hook up. And no interest in the other baits.

Sid, however, had steady action on the lipless crankbait, most of which came when fishing it in an unorthodox manner. While he did catch a couple largemouths casting the lure over top deep weedbeds – a solid pattern – most of his hits occurred when we were working weedless rock/gravel banks for smallmouth. There, he received numerous hits by simply allowing the lure to sink to the bottom, and then grinding it along the bottom via a fairly steady retrieve.

While it’s not uncommon to work a lipped crankbait in that manner – since they deflect off the bottom, and then float back up – it’s an unusual method for a lipless crankbait such as Sid’s, which sinks. At any rate, the bass seemed to like the look, though many hits were missed. And many hooked fish were lost. We theorized the fish were pinning the lure against the bottom, thinking it was a crayfish, resulting in poorly hooked (or missed) fish, and why so many never made it to the boat.

Thinking back, I recall a time when my longtime friend Dave Keith caught several wild brown trout from a Jefferson County stream by simply dangling a green weenie – a simple fly consisting of a wrap of green chenille – in the current. No surprise with the fly, as it suggests any number of aquatic and terrestrial bugs, and is well proven.

But the wary brown trout – wild ones in particular – have a reputation for ignoring offerings not presented in the natural flow of the current. Dave took several by simply dangling the fly in fairly stiff current in front of a partially submerged fallen tree, from which the trout would dart out to take the fly.

The unexpected applies to fish location as well. During the morning of the day Sid and I fished Keystone, I’d guided a party on the Allegheny near Foxburg. The river was still a bit cloudy from the wet September, but was back down to a normal flow for the time of year. The day had been productive, with good numbers of fish coming from classic locations.

We pulled up to another area with the plan of fishing the edge of a series of small gravel islands, where bass often set up along a fringe of shallow grass. As is often the case in setting up for a drift, I’d stopped well upriver of the targeted area, so we’d be all settled in by the time the boat floated into position.

With the boat still 15 or so yards upriver of the “good water,” Wayne made his first cast out in what is basically just a featureless gravel flat, a foot or so deep. Immediately his rod went into a sharp bend, and I feared he’d hung up. Within a couple seconds, though, the fish made itself known and headed for deeper water.

Wayne had his hands full for a few minutes, playing tug of war with a big smallmouth bass. After it finally had been boated, we measured the thick bass at just over 20 inches, pushing the five-pound mark.

Expecting the unexpected is just one of the many great aspects of fishing.

Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle