Gone Fishing

It is the time of year when I begin to think about fishing. The weather is warming, the woods are greening, and sitting at a desk where I work becomes less and less tolerable.

When I was young, I longed for my father’s first important question of the spring “do you want to go fishing this Saturday?” It did not happen very often. We were a family of six and  survived on his sole income. He worked a lot of overtime to make ends meet, and that included Saturday morning from 6am until noon. My mother, who I think was “the law” when it came to the weekly budget, knew that playing hooky (was that word derived from fishing) meant not only the loss of 9 hours of pay, but the outing also cost money in the form of gas, licenses, and tackle.

So, I do not recall that we fished more that a half dozen times a year. Most years it was less than that. I looked forward to every trip. Usually, it meant getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning, quietly sneaking out of the house with a quick breakfast that my father made will I got dressed. Then I would fall back to sleep as he drove us through the pre-dawn hours to arrive and be fishing by sunrise.

Most often, we headed for the little “Yellowstone Lake” in southwest Wisconsin, or the lakes around Madison. Later in my teens, we fished on the backwaters of the Mississippi River near Savanah, Illinois. We were after bass and panfish. Crappies were a good catch, but even bluegills made for a good fish fry.

You do not always catch fish. On many trips, we came home “skunked”. That did not matter, as one out of every 4 or 5 times, we would do well. It did not matter because we were outdoors, on the water, at the crack of dawn. Birds were waking up. There was no background noise from town or a highway. You were completely relaxed, just waiting for action. Sometimes the sun would come up, and the temperature rose, making for a hot morning in our little boat. Other times you sat and watched rain drip off the hood of your jacket.

Time went by, and even when no fish were caught, there was always the anticipation that they might start to bite any minute. We would dream up reasons why this might be so, like a cloud darkening the sky, are the start of a light rain. Or, it might be the sun coming out and rain stopping. It could also be just the time of day. One trick we used to incorporate, was to open the cooler for a sandwich and a coke. Invariably, having your hands full of a 12 ounce can and a cheese and bologna sandwich would result in a fish biting.

But not always. Some days we sat there for many hours. I never became bored. I was on the water and with my father. We did not even say much. As it became mid-morning, he would ask “shall we call it a day?” or “shall we head for home?” I never ever said yes. It was a game he knew well.

You would never know when it could turn into a perfect day. Like once on the Mississippi, where we caught crappies from under a fallen tree until we ran out of minnows, or the rainy, windy day down on the Lake Michigan beach below Honeysuckle Lane, where in the crashing surf, we landed 50 rainbow trout between 8 and 12 pounds. There was the trip to Leach Lake, Minnesota, where we fished for 4 days without a single catch, but then on the last half day, we caught so many perch we lost count, ran out of bait, and had to use a strip of belly skin to keep fishing for more. We caught our limit of 300 plus more and had to give the extras away to a couple less fortunate fisherman so we did not get into trouble.

Even with those memorable trips, I never regretted the slow days. I would have gone even if guaranteed of no catch before the trip started. My father worked hard to support his family, but sometimes he just needed to go fishing. And I needed to go with him.

There is sometimes nothing you can say about a fishing trip to improve its quality in your memory, and in those cases, it is usually best not to try.   –  Chad Vanzanten

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