People often ask what I like best about fishing. Though it may seem easy to respond that it’s reeling in a big one, the answer really isn’t so cut and dried.

The best part of fishing? It depends. It depends on the lake. It depends on the season and the day. It depends on the weather, the conditions and a myriad of other factors that drive our experiences every time we go to the water.

For me, in fact, it is almost impossible to single out a “best” from a day on the lake. It might be sunrise, the fresh scent of a brand new morning, the whiff of outboard motor smoke or the honking from a V of geese flying overhead. Or it might be the gurgle of a topwater lure, the wiggle of the minnow as we add it to the hook, the splash of bass running bluegills from a spawning bed or the screech of an osprey.

Every time I go to Mosquito, I get a thrill idling through the gap in the state park marina breakwater and scanning north and east across thousands of acres of bass and walleye water. Likewise at Lake Erie, I love the vista across the harbor from wherever I launch and the bluewater promise stretching to the horizon.

When I launch at Lake Milton, I am excited about the morning of possibilities. From the Pointview ramp, I can idle up the river to Carson’s Landing, Shillings Mill and beyond for backwater largemouths, river-dwelling smallies and leg-long muskies. Or, I might zoom north to the dam and try to raise some big ones before the boat traffic gets gnarly.

Berlin is a favorite, too, serving up memories of largemouth limits, monster muskies and buckets loaded with crappies and white bass from the Deer Creek dam tailwaters to the Mill Creek arm.

The best part of a day at Mosquito, Milton, Berlin or any of my other lakes is too fine a line to define for me. Catching a bass, a walleye or a crappie is great. But so are the locations I select, the vistas before my eyes, and the sensory overload of sounds and scents that I cannot experience elsewhere in my life.

Big fish are fun, yes, but they are not always the best thing about my day. I boated a 6-pound largemouth bass this year, a 7-pound walleye, a 5-pound smallmouth, a 39-inch northern pike and several 14-inch crappies. All were high points, but not necessarily the highest.

If the best is the pinnacle, where and when did I reach the peak?

Maybe it was the 63-bass day a friend and I experienced. Or maybe the 18-pound limit in a bass tournament or my heaviest-ever limit of Ohio River smallies. They were gratifying accomplishments, but maybe not the best.

Maybe not the best because anglers always know deep down inside there is more they could have done. Could I have weighed 20 pounds if I changed lures? Did we stay too long with a dwindling school of crappies? Why did those two big smallies come unbuttoned?

The best, in truth, is a moving target. The best part of today on the lake is different from the best part of fishing any other day.

Best, in my opinion, is the sum of the experiences — from arriving at the launch to returning to the dock. It’s everything about prep and planning, fishing and catching, and packing it in at the end of the day with memories to inspire our next trips to our lakes.

The best part of fishing? It’s everything an angler might imagine.

Jack Wollitz’s first newspaper fishing column was published in 1988 and now appears every weekend in the Vindicator and Tribune Chronicle. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.