We got the band back together this week, but our first performance fell short of critical acclaim.

Fellow Poland resident Steve Zarbaugh and I share many years of friendship and a zeal for bass fishing and tournament competition. We teamed to fish “buddy” tournaments for a decade before his growing family found him investing more time in bleachers at youth sports events than on the casting deck on bass waters.

Thursday, however, we cleared our schedules for a return to action in a local bass tournament at Mosquito Lake. It was as though we’d never gone on hiatus, at least in terms of the familiarity with each other’s moves in the boat.

We agreed on the locations to fish, the lures to try and just about everything else that goes into bass teamwork, but the fish apparently were not much impressed.

Sacking a limit is hardly enough these days to score well on Mosquito. Winning typically requires five largemouth bass with a total weight of 16 to 20 pounds, depending on the conditions of the day. Our limit was far short of our expectations.

At sunrise Thursday, our boat bubbled with pretournament optimism. It was a fresh day with eight hours of fishing time waiting out in front of us. Our rods were rigged, the boat was launched and the starter sent us racing up the lake to stop number one.

By midmorning, it became apparent the horde of bass that I’d located last week had dispersed, so we resorted to scrambling in the fashion that saved our butts many times in the years gone by. As we snapped the live well lid shut on our fifth keeper of the day, the familiar feeling of accomplishment we enjoyed in the past once again settled over us.

It’s always good when the live well is full. The mood shifts away from the concern that a tournament angler has about admitting back at the dock that he or she failed to max out.

When the fifth bass is in the box, the mood is relaxed, the banter is brighter and the intensity turns to looking for a big bruiser to cull out toward the weight that might be required to earn the first-place money.

Our day turned out to be much more than how hefty our weight might become. We wanted to win, but as the minutes ticked up to hours, I sensed neither of us would be judging our Thursday on the lake as a failure.

Steve’s a funny man. He delves into the quirky details about people and circumstances to come up with hilarious observations that make the fishless moments fly by. He is known to recite lines from popular TV shows that somehow bring into perspective real on-the-water happenings far removed from the fiction in which the lines were originally uttered.

Hardly a minute passes without one of us laughing out loud. One minute he’s waxing on about his appreciation for the Freddie Mercury story in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the next minute he’s weaving a zany analysis of current events.

Steve also is the proud father of two daughters who excel in Poland schools and in the sports they love to play. He celebrates their As and is there to watch every kick, shot, at-bat, catch and putt. It is clear he’s not a brag dad. He and wife, Stacie, are doing their best to guide the girls to greatness.

He enjoyed the rare day on the lake to get our band back together again, to relive the adventures we shared in bass boats on lakes from Virginia to upstate New York and close to home here in Northeast Ohio.

We fished hard and with focus, which is half of the challenge in tournament competition. The other half — finding weightier specimens — eluded us.

But all in all, the band played well, and we promised each other it would be sooner rather than later when we join again for another performance.

jackbbaass@gmail.com