Kunes, you have me sitting here in tears. I haven’t posted here in several years. I moved to Lexington, S.C. seven years ago. Hurt my back, had surgery, and haven’t been fishing in a while either. I’m now 73 and moving pretty slow. I of course knew Rango, being from Clover all of my life. We had talked fishing, but had never hooked up. I was striper fishing at Wateree one fine morning around the mouth of Col. creek, by myself, and I was killing them. I almost had my limit of 10, when I saw this huge John boat coming up on me, watching me catch fish. It was Rango and Pete Malec. They were new to bait fishing, and when Rango saw that it was me, he pulled the Beast alongside, crawled into my boat, and told Pete he was going to fish with me a while to see what I was doing different. Two hours later, we had 20, and I think Pete had his limit of 10. That started one of the best friendships that I ever had. I was working 60-80 hours a week at the time. I did very little crappie fishing because every day that I was off, I was at Wateree in the spring and fall. I watched two old gents early in my days at Wateree. We were catching nothing, and they came by and they were thumping the bottom of the boat with a small stick. We laughed at them and suddenly they started pulling big stripers in, one after another. That is when I started thumping. Not too long after that, Rango named me Thumper and it stuck. Rango and I caught hundreds of stripers together. In the spring, he would call me and we would head to what he called the “river run” behind the dam. We would bottom fish for striper and big cats. We fished together for 15 years and we never had a cross word with each other. Robert “Rango” Plemmons was one hell of a man and I miss the phone calls we used to have after both of us had to give up fishing. R.I.P my Friend!