Fishing With the Boys

Fishing with My Boys

Even at his young age, this boy has the perfect form down!

 Last weekend Gunner turned three and Dylan turned the big eleven. Both boys wanted to go fishing for their birthday so we loaded up in my boat and hit the Fredericktown City Lake with my dad. This was the first time that Gunner would be able to ride in my boat and he was beyond excited. On the way out to the lake he had shouted, “I hope we fish for hours!”

The day was warm and there was very little wind so the weather was looking perfect for some fishing. Gunner stood next to me by the trolling motor and smiled at the lake then hugged my leg. “Dad, this is awesome.”

“I know, Son. I love it.”

“Me too.” He said as he made a beautiful cast into the lake. He was using a pole I had given him that was given to me when I was about his age. My dad had gave me the five foot white Zebco rod and reel combo that I had used for many years until I had finally upgraded to heavier gear. Now it was his. Though the original reel had long since worn out, the rod still held a great deal of ‘luck’ that we continually reminded Gunner of. Every time we would say that he would surely catch a fish because of his lucky fishing pole, he would smile ear to ear and cast even farther.

After making a few casts of my own I noticed that Dylan had yet to get a lure in the water. I turned to find him in a position that I had been in many times before but would never admit to anyone. His crank bait, both hooks, was securely buried in his flannel shirt while he worked feverishly to relieve himself from his trap.

“You okay back there?” I asked as I smiled at Dad.

“Yeah. Just got hung up.” Dylan muttered as he pulled his pocket knife from his tackle box.

                      After an epic battle with his flannel shirt, Dylan finally was able to fish!

I had fished a few minutes longer when I had heard Dylan shout a victory cry, letting us know that he had been freed from his bonds, and then I heard, “Crap! Are you kidding me?” I turned back around to find that he had in fact freed the crank bait from the flannel shirt but in his cheering his victory he had snagged the opposite side of his flannel. We all laughed and continued to fish as he dug out the treble hooks again. Eventually Dylan was able to fish and we trolled around the lake.

At one point Dylan tried to cast but ended up snagging me in the back with his crank bait. While I tried to untangle that mess, Gunner hooked me in the belly with his worm. “Sorry, Dad.” They both said. I had to laugh. It reminded me of my brother and I when we were kids hooking our dad in the boat. At least I didn’t have a hook in my head like we had done Dad so many times. I looked up just in time to see a dark shadow falling from the sky. I ducked just in time to dodge  another falling crank bait that my dad had just flipped off of a tree limb. Dad began laughing and said, “It’s like having three kids in the boat ain’t it?” We fished for a couple of hours and we got several bites but we never hooked into a fish.

Gunner, however, did catch several types of dinosaurs while we fished. He sloshed his pole around the side of the boat and would pull his pink worm up and shout, “Dad, look! I caught a dinosaur.”

“Good job, Son! See, your pole is lucky.” He would smile and slosh his pole in the water again and repeat the process. I turned my attention towards the lake so I could steer the boat along the bank when I heard an odd noise from Gunner. I believe it was the word, “Opps.”

I turned back to find the little monkey holding on to the side of the boat with his feet sticking straight up in the air, his right arm deep in the water up to his shoulder as he started shouting, “Noooooooo!” I quickly grabbed his ankle and lifted him up from the water while he dangled upside down and said, “Stinkbug? What are you doing?”

“My fishing pole, Dad! It fell in.” The hurt that spread across that little boy's eyes about broke my heart. He just stood there and stared at the ripples in the water while my dad and me tried to use our crank baits to snag the pole off the bottom about 8 feet down. We were not able to retrieve the pole and decided that we had had enough fun for one day and headed back to the truck. Dylan was excited that he had gotten to fish and had bragged that he did not get stuck in trees as much as me or my dad. Which was true; he had spent a good hour trying to get a crank bait out of his flannel so we had more time on the water! He was also happy that he actually had plenty of bass fishing gear to shuffle through like a pro angler that he had received for his birthday but Gunner was still down. It was not the way I wanted our fishing trip to end.

“You okay Stinkbug?”

“Yes, Dad. I miss my fishing pole.”

“It’s okay buddy. We will get you another one.”

“I really liked that one though.”

The whole ride home he patted my dad’s leg and just stared at the dashboard of the truck, every once in a while saying, “I really liked that fishing pole.”

The next day I took Gunner to Wal-Mart and we went straight to the fishing department. I pulled down each fishing pole and let him hold it until he finally held the one that was perfect for him. He held it in his hands like a knight finding a sword that was the perfect fit for him. It was a blue Shakespeare rod and reel and he immediately fell in love with it.

“Oh, Dad. Look at this one. Can I get it?”

“You like it?”

“I love it.”

“I guess we can get it then.”

He then started scanning the rest of the fishing poles and I said, “Son, you only get one pole.”

“No, you need a fishing pole, Dad.”

“Why do I need a pole, Son?” I asked.

“I lost your favorite pole that Paw Paw gave you. I need to get you a fishing pole.” I realized real quick that what was bothering my son wasn’t just that he had lost his favorite fishing pole but that he felt a pain that he had lost something of mine. It was true that I had had that little pole since I was his age; Dylan had used the pole until Gunner was born, and now it was gone. But it was just a fishing pole. What mattered was that my little boy was happy.

“Son that was your pole. I gave it to you. I have plenty of fishing poles, so don’t you worry about me, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“Now that you have a ‘big boy’ fishing pole, you need a ‘big boy’ tackle box to go with it.”

Gunner smiled and ran to where the tackle boxes were. He picked out a small tackle box and then we found a Rebel grasshopper for him to put in it. He was in Heaven.

     He would not let me carry any of his fishing gear. He said he was a big boy and could carry it all.

After paying for our purchase Gunner informed me that we had to go to my mom and dad’s house (E and Paw Paw) to show off his new fishing gear. Paw Paw and E have a pond at their house and he was ready to try out his new lure and pole on their fish.

Standing on the bank of the pond, I hooked a small bass on my fishing pole and handed the rod and reel to Gunner for him to reel in. He cheered and jumped up and down as the fish flopped from the water to the bank. As I had Gunner ‘help’ me get my line untangled, Paw Paw put the bass on Gunner’s fishing pole while he wasn’t looking and pitch the fish in the water. When my pole was squared away, Paw Paw handed Gunner his new fishing pole and told him to reel it in.

           Gunner has learned the art of holding the fish close to the camera so it appears much larger!

“I got a fish!”

“Another one!” I shouted. “Man you are tearing them up buddy!”

“It is huge Dad!”

The bass broke the surface and Gunner cheered again. As Paw Paw took the bass off the line, Gunner ‘helped’ me catch a frog, then Paw Paw put the bass back on Gunner’s fishing pole. Once again, Gunner reeled in his pole and shouted, “I got another fish!” By now the bass was wore out and just let himself get drug in by the excited little boy and hung nicely for some pictures while Gunner bragged up the ‘three’ bass that he caught on his new lucky pole.

 

 Since that day, he does not go anywhere without his fishing pole and tackle box. My wife made a trip to Virginia with my oldest daughter and Gunner went along. He refused to get in the car until they figured out a way to get his fishing pole and tackle box in a VW bug! The little boy is so hooked on fishing, my wife bought him a toy fishing pole with plastic fish so he can fish in the bathtub while he takes a bath. Now that is a love for fishing and I may have created a monster!

The Things That We Learn Fishing

The Things That We Learn Fishing

 

            To those out there that do not do much bass fishing, you may have an idea in your head that fishing is easy. You cast out, you reel in, and BAM! You catch a fish. You may even hold a notion that you just need to squish an old wiggling worm on your hook and wait for your cork to go under. Well, bass fishing does not work that way. Everything is done with artificial lures ranging from plastic worms to jigs, spinner baits, and crank baits that represent bait fish fleeing the hungry bass you are trying to catch. You need to have knowledge of the structure your prey likes to stalk around, their tendencies at different water temperatures as well as their movements during different times of year. Of course, a blind hog can find an acorn every once in a while just as an amateur angler can find a straggling bass on a large lake wondering the open water looking for a free meal but having the knowledge of the species really helps to keep you from spending hours of casting blindly.

This past weekend I fished a bass tournament with the Kentucky Pro Bass Warrior’s and had a blast! After spending several hours in the boat with our partner Donnie and a buddy of mine Chris, I started thinking about all of the things I had learned about bass fishing. A great majority of it was through what dad had learned from his experiences and others were through publications like Bassmasters and In-Fisherman. I remember when I was about ten, my dad and I was watching Bassmasters on TV one cold December morning and there was a pro angler talking about how the heat of wood and rock attracts bass because that water will be warmer than the rest of the water in the area you are fishing. He then went on to use a rubber worm with very light weight and let it sink very slowly along large rocks and stumps to where these fish were hiding. It seemed like every cast he was catching another bass and by the end of the show we were itching with fishing fever.

“Think we should go fishing?” Dad asked.

“Yep.” I said as I ran outside to grab my fishing gear and stash it in our boat.

Like I said, it was December and when we arrived at our destination nearly two hours later there was a very thin sheet of ice around the boat ramp.

“Doesn’t look like anyone else is dumb enough to fish today.”

“We are!” I said excitedly.

We trolled our boat out past the ice and found a spot where the water was roughly ten to twelve foot deep with a wooden wall going all the way down to the lake bottom. The wall was built to keep some rich people’s back yards from washing into the lake but it fit the description we needed to practice what we had just learned from watching Bassmasters. We began casting just as we had seen on the show and before long we began to haul in bass after bass from that wooden sea wall. Though we were freezing and every so often we had to knock the ice out of the eyelets of our reels and poles, we were catching a large number of fish. After catching our limit and having our limit of the cold weather as well, we trolled back to the boat ramp and I stepped out onto the boat dock and held on to our tow rope as dad went to retrieve the Jeep. After backing the trailer into the icy water he stepped out onto the trailer and said, “Ok, bring me the rope so I can pull the boat onto the trailer.”

Those were simple instructions but I felt it was easier to toss the rope to him. Like the lessons we had learned that day in fishing, I was about to learn one in physics. The distance between my dad and I was farther than the length of the rope that I had in my hand. The rope snapped tight in midair and then fell into the icy water while the boat slowly began to drift away from us. Dad started at me disbelieving.

“I said BRING me the rope. Not THROW me the rope.”

“Yeah. That was stupid.”

“You think. Well you better go get it.”

I looked at the water. “Me?”

“Yea you. I didn’t throw the rope in there. Better hurry to because that boat is getting farther away.”

I dove into the water and instantly had the air sucked from my lungs but I was a trooper and swam to the tow rope and this time brought it to my dad. After getting it loaded on the trailer and ourselves in the Jeep I noticed that my pants were frozen solid. Lesson learned. A good day fishing can be ruined by a lesson in physics and a two hour ride home in a soft topped Jeep without a properly working heater.

Another lesson in physics I was taught through fishing was the act of “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” This lesson took place on the same body of water, in the same boat, on the same boat ramp, but I had learned my lesson about tossing the rope to my dad. I was a bit older so I was allowed to use our outboard to push the boat up on the trailer. I did this like a pro and dad hooked the boat onto the trailer with the safety strap and asked, “You wanna hop out before I pull up the ramp?”

“No, I am good. Go ahead.”

What I didn’t realize was that the boat ramp was washed out just past where the trailer was sitting. I also didn’t realize that dad knew this and he planned on driving a little faster than normal to insure that he could pull the trailer through the deep wash out. When the trailer tire, located under me, hit the lip of the drop off it shot up like a rocket. This caused me to then shoot out of my seat like a ragdoll that had been seated on top of the rocket, throwing me roughly 700 feet in the air (Ok, that is an exaggeration) and then splashed down into the water along with my tackle box and several fishing poles. Luckily this time when I fell into the water it was not winter but midsummer so the water was somewhat refreshing, though shocking at the same time. I sputtered to the surface to the voice of my dad hollering, “Grab my poles! Grab my poles!” I began swimming around the small cove collecting what gear that was floating, including lures that had escaped my open tackle box. By the time I exited the water I looked like a walking Rapala advertisement with crank baits dangling from every bit of my clothing. Dad was laughing so hard that he was bent over trying to catch his breath.

“That was not funny.” I said as I tried to pull hooks from my shirt.

“Yes it was! I looked in the rear view mirror and you shot out of that seat like you was being abducted by aliens! You went right up in the air!” He howled with laughter again and this time I had to laugh.

“It was pretty neat to fly.” I said sheepishly.

“Maybe next time you will get out of the boat, huh?”

“Only when you are driving, Dad.”

We learn so much each time we hit the water and it is not always on ways we catch the fish. This past weekend the fishing was tough. There were a few tournaments going on besides our own and we were in the mix of all those boats, bad weather, and low water conditions. Most people would just give up and quit fishing but that just isn’t how we work. We were in it for the long haul. I spent the large majority of the day without a fish (but loving the fact I was fishing) until Donnie, our volunteer who took us fishing, suggested I use a jig. He showed me how to rig it and how to work it and on my second cast I reeled in a spotted bass. That is all I needed. It wasn’t a monster but it was enough for me to realize that as a fisherman, I am always that child learning something new.

As we weighed in our fish we watched as other soldiers brought their catches in, patted each other on the back and shared their fishing stories and my heart felt good. I felt like a whole person again. I had spent the whole week with the mindset that I wanted to win, I wanted to walk away with the biggest fish, and strut around to the song, “We are the Champion’s” but instead I learned something. Winning isn’t just the person who walks away with the most or biggest fish. It is the person who walks away with the greatest amount of joy in his heart. Donnie Davis, Buster Meador, and Kaoru O’Bryan (and many other volunteers that I do not remember their names) took the time out of their weekend to take some of us fishing so that we could have this experience and bring that joy to us and we appreciate it. They not only shared their time but their boat, equipment, their own money, and their vast knowledge of bass fishing to insure that we walked away with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. I thank them for that, for teaching us things we didn’t know, and not throwing me from the boat.

The Memories We Make

The Memories We Make

 

            This time of year gets me itching to hit the water and catch bucket loads of fish. The bipolar mood swings of Mother Nature begin to start fading away and those warm rays of a new spring sun melt the ice in my veins and open up the rusty old memory box in my brain. This weekend I will be fishing a bass tournament with the Kentucky Pro Bass Warriors and I am so excited I can hardly stand myself. I feel like a kid again, when dad would slip into my room on them cool mornings, before the sun had even peeked over the horizon, to lightly kick the side of my bed and say, “Hey, you up?” Rarely did he really have to wake me. Most nights before I knew we were heading out bass fishing I could hardly sleep so I would wait into those early morning hours for my bedroom door to open and hear the floor creak as dad quietly tiptoed into the room. “Yep!” I would always whisper loudly and begin slipping on my clothes.

            It didn’t matter how old I got, the scenario was always played out the same. It was like Christmas in spring, just a boy waiting for his dad to take him on their next big fishing adventure. I relived this somewhat this past weekend with my boys. As some of you know, Dylan is my stepson but I claim the little turd as my own. He and Gunner, who will be three at the end of this month, met me at Lake Barkley here in Kentucky. The weather was perfect and the boys were excited to get out to the Lake.

“Dad?” Gunner shouted from the backseat of the truck.

“Yeah buddy.”
“Hey, you and bubby are going to catch big fish and I am going to catch a little one okay?” I looked in the mirror and smiled at the dirty faced little boy and just shook my head. His eyes were wild with excitement as he got his first glimpse of the lake. The same look I get when I look at the water, thinking of where all the fish could be hiding. Every cast that I make, no matter how tired I am, no matter how long I have gone without a bite, I always have a vision that there is a big ‘ol bass waiting in the exact spot I just casted and it keeps my heart young. Gunner has the same look and excitement for fishing as I do. It must be hereditary.

“I bet we catch a ten pounder!” Dylan said as his eyes grew wild too.

“I will be happy with one.” I said as I laughed at my two fishermen.

            Before I had kids of my own, I would watch dads along the banks of the lakes and rivers that I fished letting their kids throw rocks in the water or letting their kids play around the best parts of the water to fish and I would get so angry.

They claimed to call themselves fishermen and they allowed this?-Was usually a thought that raced through the red that floated in my head. After I grew older, wiser, and had children of my own I learned something about fishing that I had always overlooked. It wasn’t about the fish you were catching but the memories we were creating that always made my fishing trips the best. You cannot create memories if you restrict your children to fishing like adults. They are not adults. They are children with big dreams and wild imaginations and we have to fuel that with great fishing trips that involve more than just catching fish. I thought about this as I watched Gunner chuck rocks at a brush pile that I would normally be pitching a spinner bait through. My imaginary 20 pound bass that was waiting for my bait became spooked and shot out into deeper water where it would be safe from the projectiles hurled by this deranged toddler.

“Hey dad? Did you see that? I almost skipped it!” Gunner shouted.

“Yep. Good job buddy. You want to catch a fish now?” He placed his pointer finger on his chin as if he was in deep thought and finally said, “We need to tell Uncle Steve to come fishing with us.”

“We do? Why is that?”

“You don’t catch any fish dad. Uncle Steve catches fish.”

I had to laugh. You cannot argue with the honesty of a little boy. Growing up, there was little that my younger brother could beat me at. It wasn’t really because I was better than him; it was more that I was bigger and faster than he was. The one place where we always had an even playing field though was in the woods and on the lakes. He was always better at hunting than me and still is, but normally the lakes and rivers were my place to shine. It did not stop us from competing every time we hit the water or woods and it still continues today.

      Gunner's first bass that he caught all by himself a year ago. He was barely two  years old!
 

 

The boys spent a total of about 15 minutes with their lines in the water and the rest of our time we walked the banks and found shells and rocks. The boys asked a million questions about fish, alligators, UFO’s, and zombies. We watched geese and other birds that flew along the lake as we slowly made our way along on our little adventure. As we walked Gunner grabbed my pants leg and hugged my leg almost causing me to fall onto the gravel bank.

“What are you doing crazy?” I said laughing.

The little boy looked up at me with his shiny blue eyes and said, “This is fun. I love you dad.”

In those words, that look that my little boy gave me, I realized that I may not have ever told my dad how much it meant to me for him to take us fishing. As soon as I was old enough to not crap my pants dad was taking me fishing. And even in my failing memory, I can remember every trip that we ever took. Every fish that we caught, all the tips and tricks that he taught me on how to catch bass and catfish, but most of all, how to love the outdoors and share that experience with others. I can’t leave mom out of these memories either. While dad was at work, my brother and I would spend our time in the yard practicing our casting and more than once mom would have to help pull a hook out of one of us or untangle line from a tree limb. I always wondered how dad handled having two little boys in a boat with him, hooking each other and him, getting stuck in trees, and spending more time trying to catch the little perch rather than fish for the big catfish and bass he was going for, but I know now. It was for the memories. It was the love of a fisherman to share his love with his sons. It was that one time that a little boy smiles and says, “This is fun. I love you dad.”

It makes it all worth it.

It is always fun dad. I love you.
 (Hey dad! Look I made you famous and put you on the internet with a bass! Hahaha)
Picture used with permission of Uncle Steve.