This is a tale that will bear such truth, brag about such wise angling decisions and bare such idiocy that I’m glad my wife is not a regular reader of MidWest Outdoors.

Last March’s annual Ultimate Outdoors Show in Grand Rapids, Mich., was as great as ever, with all sorts of stuff that hunters and anglers find interesting.

I was there the whole weekend, splitting time between talking about Hobie kayaks at the Gull Lake Marine display and walking the floor. One of the show highlights is the Saturday night exhibitor party, which, after the show closes, offers free beer, hot dogs and a terrifically fun fishing contest on Lake Ultimate.

This “lake” is a 110,000-gallon, above-ground swimming pool, about 4 feet deep, stocked with loads of rainbow trout and floating a couple of fishing boats. In front of a high set of bleachers, professional anglers present seminars on it.

In the Saturday night fishing contest, competitors pay a $5 entry fee, pair off against each other on separate boats tied to piers at the same end of this long pool and try to be the first to catch a fish. The first fish of these one-on-one face-offs gets weighed, and the largest three fish win part of the pot. I had never competed, but got a bug to give it a try.

The idiocy on Saturday afternoon was giving in to this burning competitive urge without having brought any of my countless rods or one of my approximately three million lures from home. So I went shopping.

Of course, there is no better place to find great deals on tackle than at an outdoor show.

Figuring the trout were programmed to eat small, green fish-food pellets, I decided to create a bait to match. I bought some tiny Z-Man ShroomZ Ned Rig Jigheads, named after finesse expert Ned Kehde, a retired biologist turned freelance writer in Kansas. Ned is one of my writing heroes, and hosts a web-based discussion group called the Finesse News Network. Members constantly sing the praises of the Ned Rig, which is a short piece of soft plastic on one of these heads. Z-Man makes these plastics and calls them the T.R.D. The inside joke is that the “E.” is missing. Get it? T.E.R.D. The bait really looks like one, but boy does it catch fish.

Not finding any T.R.D. packs at the show, I bought some YUM Dingers, a 5-inch stick worm with a pointy tail. I snipped off about 2-1/4 inches of tail and paired it with a 1/16-ounce jighead. The greenish thing looked like it just might represent a pellet of food.

Then I bought a spinning combo made by Shimano for $40; added some 8-pound FireLine (per Ned’s advice) for the main line and 8-pound fluorocarbon leader material. Altogether, my new tackle cost $104. Please don’t tell my wife.

So the show closes and the contest begins in front of a hooting, beer-lubed crowd of exhibitors, and one of the first two anglers catches a dandy rainbow of almost three pounds. That fish stays solidly in first place as two by two, competitors square off and try to catch a bigger fish in the two minutes of allotted fishing time.

Finally, after about 15 pairs of anglers had competed, I was on-deck, ready to fish against Jon Hendricks of Grand Rapids, an old friend. As we waited to mount the platform, the two anglers competing in front of us, like all of the anglers so far, cast way out toward the middle of Lake Ultimate. As the crowd cheered, I noticed a couple of largemouth bass hovering right under the pier, maybe two feet from where the anglers stood in the boats. The bass looked bigger than the top trout, so my game plan changed.

Once in the boat, I held my makeshift Ned Rig in one hand, rod in the other, and when the emcee shouted “Start Fishing!” instead of casting, I turned around and plunked my lure between the pier and the boat. It worked! Immediately, one of the bass engulfed it, and I was quickly striding to the weigh-in basket, all smiles, a dripping largemouth bass wagging at the end of my line. My bass weighed 1.27 pounds, nowhere near as big as the top trout, but solidly second place.

This is where this story gets a little sad for me. Two walleye pros who signed up for the contest didn’t have a fishing rod and asked to borrow mine. I let them. The first pro copied me exactly and caught the bigger bass from under the same pier, bumping me into third place. The other caught a trout that weighed 1.6 pounds and took second place. Both fish came on my Ned Rig. I was fourth and out of the money.

What did we learn in kindergarten? Sharing! What did we learn on Lake Ultimate? Keep your Ned Rig for yourself!

Dave Mull, Paw Paw, Mich., started trolling for Lake Michigan salmon and trout with his family back in the late 1970s and has caught most of the gamefish species found in all five Great Lakes. Still an avid troller and kayak angler, he has been an editor of “Great Lakes Angler Magazine” for 15 years and is co-founder of Great Lakes Angler Super Salmon Schools, with five sessions planned for 2016. Check out the Great Lakes Angler Super Salmon Schools Facebook page for more information.