Catfish & Crawlers

There are few events in life I appreciate more than a day of fishing with my family. While I could spend hours floating solo on my sundolphin journey 10 ss (lovingly renamed the sundog) and tugging tubes through seaweed beds or pulling up largemouth bass on a dock with friends to the soundtrack of beer cans opening, I would somehow always choose the tangling lines and Mom’s sandwiches. Trust me when I say each has its own allure but there is something about returning to my roots of family and fishing that makes these days some of the best days there are to me.

Last weekend I awoke early and the soft white light that appeared in long rectangles on my

wall between cracked blinds called me to the bay. I listened and gathered my spinning rod and fly-fishing rod and rigged my kayak for a morning on the warming May water. I carefully selected a neon green popper with a tail that mimicked the bike handlebar streamers a young girl might have had installed. I smiled like one myself as I twisted the tipit through the eyelet and wondered if I was doing it right (fly fishing is a VERY new found love of mine). I arranged my soft plastic lures and spinner baits into a smaller box and organized them by shape and color quickly; the way a kid might organize his rock collection. I peered out onto the lake while attaching a weighted hook with a gold tube to a swivel and envied the fisher men and women who had made it out there before the sun, and myself, had begun to rise. In the first 30 minutes of what one might call day I eagerly scooted down the canal with two poles, all my favorite and fanciest baits, and a cockiness I often regret because fishing very often is just luck. I pushed the steamy shallow canal liquid past me and left subtle ripples in the narrow water path as I attempted to enter the bay in secrecy. I had done this a million times before and I assure you I will do it a million more, there are mornings I go out and fish to fish and there are mornings I go out hungry; and in that hunger I become this person who believes I have done just enough reading, Youtube video watching, and practicing to believe I will do just fine out there 9 times out of 10. Well, as one might expect, that was not the case, as it has not been many times before and will not be for many more times.

I sat out there in the hazy white heat of morning, the fog glazing over the horizon and blending the water with the sky; after hours, I was growing tired of the whizzing of my spinning reel and the inconsistency of my fly casts. I watched my fellow anglers and worried as their anchors were pulled one after the other and the boats shifted north. The sundog’s most effective tool was by far the rod holder and I’m not talking about me, I mean the actual rod holder mounted front and center and the two in the back so unfortunately, the closest device I have to a fish finder is the trust I place in nearby bass rigs sparkling with gold, green, and hope. Of course, they’ve been as wrong as a computer has before too, but today was not one of those days and for the few that pulled in a bass I didn’t have it in me to offer them the flattery of, “what are ya using?” I began to paddle further in, towards neighboring canals, where the seawall was drumming with bumping boats in the waves. I snuck my way into the more kayak friendly shallows and crevices below the indolent willow branches dragging across the surface in the wind; no luck. I worked the drop off where the bay sinks into the open water of the sixth greatest lake; lake St. Clair, and not even a trusty Yum bait with a chartreuse tip hooked wacky style pulled in an offer. I began to deflate in defeat. Sure, failing is apart of any outdoor pursuit, but how could a day as faultless as today and lures collected over a couple of paychecks not promise more than a few chunks of weeds? I hung my rods in their holders like a retired baseball player might hang his glove on the shelf after his last game and let the early summer lake breeze push me home.

So, what did I do next? Packed up by 10:30AM sharp, a few hours past sunrise and in an effort to deny my quitting I put my favorite pole in the car “just incase” a spot looked good enough to give it one more try later in the day. I drove to 7/11 and smirked at the vintage cup series. The bright white cup with green and orange stripes reminded me of the collection my Dad had in a glass case in the garage of my childhood home. His cups were stacked and decorated with famous athlete’s caricatures and they sat proudly behind the filthy glass panes. I grabbed two cups and filled one with hot water that spun a green tea bag and grainy sugar around and the other with decaf coffee and one cream. When I arrived at my old man’s place, I sat on his porch without knocking because sooner or later a cigarette would ask him to join me. Sure enough, his screen door slid open and he found me sitting there with a coffee with this name on it. He pulled the cigarette from his mouth (I’ve asked him to quit thirty times) and sat across from me with the creases in the corners of his eyes asking for forgiveness. His skin was the color of a wood stain one might dye their back deck in and I asked him how much time he had spent in the sun, insisting he should be taking some time to rest, and his response, “Let’s go fishing today.” My pursuit to avoid the shame of my morning had ended in a collision with a brick wall, “let’s,” I replied with a sigh and a brief laugh.

My Dad, a lazy, cocky, and yet successful fisherman, my first casting and netting teacher,

and a handy man at heart fastened a few loose hooks into the plastic lid of his 7/11 cup, grabbed a handful of bobbers, a container or five of night crawlers from his fridge, one water bottle and two bud lights that had been chilled in his fridge since last August. We made a beeline for the lake which was conveniently a five-minute walk from his homestead.

The gear wasn’t noteworthy and my family would certainly not be receiving any letters about it back home but it would do. It was bobbers and crawlers; the gear I had grown up learning how to fish on. I shamefully masked my attempted professional angling dawn with eagerness for a second chance but held fast to caution that this could in fact be a fishless day after all. I began to laugh as he asked me to fasten a crawler on his hook as soon as we sat on the sliver guaranteed picnic table. Certainly, a debt he felt I was due to pay after years of him sporting dirty nailbeds on my childhood fishing trips. I wrapped the stocky restless insect around the hook leaving a long tail hanging off the end; the best trick in the book, as my Dad would put it.

We sat telling stories we had both heard each other tell before between long pauses prompted by suspected bites. I slid into the childlike smitten of fishing side by side with a parent and sponged up the late morning sun in contentment with the simplicity of the moment; still slightly bitter with my failure but not enough to challenge the peace. It was then, that the storm began to brew. “Fish on!” two of the greatest words in the world, and my Dad’s bobber disappeared into the depths of the river mouth. His rod bent nearly in half, as they tend to do in most fishing tales, and he worked the creature along the seawall. “Grab the net,” he directed and without a word I laid on the seawall edge and hung an arm over with the net. A five-pound channel cat reared its ugly profile and I scooped him with ease just in time for my bobber to go missing. The show would go on like this for the next eight hours and we would catch a total of thirty-two catfish and two very bad sunburns.

Halfway into the eventful day, the rest of my family joined us for the outing and the channels and flatheads showed no mercy. We argued playfully about who caught the biggest, laughed as my Mom attempted to swing a slimy fish back into the water on her own, called neighbors to offer them up a free freezer filler, and worked to keep up with the cats that fought like sharks that Sunday. Oh, the joys of catching fish.

The weariness of the morning had faded and a turn of events alongside the simplistic fishing style with my most loved ones was the correlation and the cause. Sometimes, I get so caught up in fishing the “right way” and doing it perfectly and making choices that the expert sportsman or sportswoman would that I forget what started it all; crawlers and catfish. While I love the challenge and the knowledge and all that fishing has grown to become in my life, sometimes you just want to catch fish and sometimes that means resorting to live bait; maybe that’s even the way nature intended it.

I had learned how to fish on the red and white dancing plastic spheres and blue cartons of Canadian crawlers and the mystified angling of the future couldn’t possibly dig up the root of the sport in that moment. Like anything else, I remembered that the rules are meant to be broken now and again; that there is no one way of doing things. Some ways are better than others based on a plethora of opinions but catching fish is catching fish. While my heart now belongs to largemouth bass on artificial baits and trout on brown flies, I can never quite forget my first love of midnight ringing bells on moonlit water, twitchy wet crawlers, gas station bobbers and all the traditional tackle that no proper angler should ever have any shame in using. Sometimes, you have to just get out there and catch some fish – even if that means getting your hands a little dirty in worm guts and passing a dirty rag back and forth as you smear the guts off of your hands, talk about fish you landed last summer, and wait for a bite.

There are plenty of things we could breakdown to a science, fishing included – I could work harder to read forums, understand fish migrations, study spawning patterns and hot colors and so on and so forth in an effort to increase my odds but lest we not forget, there is another option; keep it simple. Take it from my old man, who in a pinch of breaking a bobber and not having another filled his empty water bottle just enough with bud light and backwash to create the perfect bite indicating mechanism for snagging monster flatheads.

Outside of hunger, I can’t tell you exactly why bass chase a spoon any more than I could guess why a catfish would swallow my hook time after time that day but I can tell you this; fish on or not, there is no right way to enjoy the sport and while a tackle box decorated in beautiful lures is one worth talking about, the joys of sitting side by side with your family and watching their faces light up as they notice their line zip across the river are two beautiful ways to do it. Both are in fact the “right way,” one being the reason I fell in love with fishing and the other being the reason I stay in love with fishing. That, and the ice-cold bud light swigs with my Dad after snagging a few.