THE LOST ART OF BAIT FISHING
My first experience fishing, was as a ten year old on an outing with my elderly grandfather, to a small fresh-water pond, we fished with live, wriggly bait. In those days, fishing satisfied several objectives, it was a happy diversion on a hot summer day, it was relaxing, and probably the most important reason was that the catch provided supper, or at least a welcome addition to supper. Grandpa loved to eat fish and I think he would never have thought of bothering about it, if he could not come home with a nice stringer of pan fish.
One summer morning, grandpa, woke me early and motioned me to follow him. Outside, I trailed him under the grape arbor where hanging clumps of still-green Concord grapes warmed in the morning sun. We skirted the chicken coops and the rabbit hutches and finally stopped at the old wood shed on the far side of the farm. Grandpa removed the big, brass Master-lock which he hardly ever snapped shut, it always just hung there unlocked. He hooked it on the door handle. He raised the rusty hasp and pulled. The door swung open on groaning hinges, letting the morning sun stream into the dusty interior, a place I always longed to explore on my own, but was not allowed.
The old wood shed, never painted, and raised only on four locust posts was where grandpa stored all manner of interesting things----particularly exciting for a ten year-old boy. Hanging on the wall across from the door was a rusty leg-hold fox trap (but grandpa never set one). Near-by was a wire crab trap, and a broken minnow screen. The big rolled up beach seine, rested against the wall, next grandpa's ancient, single-shot Steven's .22 caliber rifle. I never saw him use that gun. He hated to kill anything. What always caught my eye was an elk-horn-handled sheath knife, and leather sheath. But there were clam rakes, eel spears and forks, a bucket of well used hand tools and jars and tin cans of rusty, salvaged nails, screws and bolts. Many of which I was well acquainted with, since one of my jobs was to straighten nails, by rolling and pounding the bends out of them, on a big block of oak with my own small hammer. The shed was a testament to the fact that Grandpa never threw anything away. Discarded pieces of lumber, from the dilapidated back porch, were saved for firewood. But prior to being cut up into fire wood, all the old nails and other hardware had to be removed first. Grandpa would pry the nails out, and I would hammer them straight, then drop them into the appropriate Mason jar or tin can. Grandpa saved, string wire, aluminum foil, paper, and just about anything you could not burn for fuel. Shelves held jars and cans of salvaged, wood screws, carriage nuts and bolts of all sizes, sheet metal screws. On the floor were coils of twisted hemp-rope, rolls of old wire, bits and pieces of copper, galvanized sheet metal. Grandpa, recycled everything on his small three-acre chicken farm. To me, the shed was a special place where we worked together at tasks like saving things, and creating new things out of old, that seemed so necessary, and so useful.
On this morning, Grandpa, shuffled across the gritty, dusty, tongue and groove floor toward the back of the structure and disappeared into the shadows where a tangle of slim, limber bamboo poles rested against the wall. He rustled among them, choosing two that for some reason, satisfied his needs. Carrying these under his arm, he moved to the shelf near the door, where from a small jelly jar which held a tangle of small, wire fishing hooks. He dislodged three Eagle Claw hooks and carefully stuck them into a wine bottle cork he took from another jar. He plucked a roll of Cuttyhunk, twisted linen fish-line from the shelf. And that was it.
Grandpa stuck the cork with the hooks into the small "bib" pocket on the top flap of his Sweet-Orr overalls and with the two poles over our shoulders we walked down the gravelly drive together.
We didn't have any shiny moving lures, plastic worms, reels, creels, bait buckets, no waders, no landing nets, or even any special clothing...only a couple of coils of braided line, a few hooks and two limber bamboo poles.
We walked down the sandy roads toward the Smith Farm on St Johnland River Road. About a mile away from the house, a bubbling artesian well--just a four inch diameter pipe stuck in the ground--poured water out of the ground and into a little stream. The stream bubbled and gurgled its way from the roadside into a five-acre pond hidden in the woods. A little foot-trail led through the pitch pine, scrub oak, willow and low brush to a little clearing where long ago someone had rolled up a big pine log to act as a seat at a favorite fishing place. The pond, ringed by thick brush and cattails sparkled in the morning sun.
Grandpa laid the two poles down across the log and sat down with a heavy humpff, like the walk to this place was a bit too long for a sixty-eight year old man. He tied the end of a hank of line to each of the bamboo pole tips. Removing the wine cork with the hooks on them out of the top pocket of his overalls. He tied one small hook to the end of each line. Each hook ended up at the end of the line about even with the butt of each pole. That's all the hardware we had.
"Robbie, now let's find us some bait."
That day, after a rainy night, for a first try, we pulled some clumps of grass from near the base of the log and searched the roots base for earthworms. We found three big ones and dumped them into a small tin can with a bit of grass and soil to keep them moist.
"When do we start to fish?" I asked, eager to begin.
"Let's gather some other baits," said grandpa, "and perhaps see how well each one works."
Leaving the poles, we walked back along the path, carrying only our small tin bait can. On our way, grandpa trapped a bumblebee under his big red bandana, plucking it from the top of a Queen Anne's Lace flower. As it buzzed angrily he carefully, pressed the trapped bee between his big calloused fingers and placed the now silent insect in our worm can. From a clump of goldenrod he found some plants with enlarged galls on their stems. He pointed out to me that the galls were complete with no exit holes so the small white wiggly grub was still at home. He pulled out his rosewood-handled, Barlow pocket knife and opening the big dark-stained blade, sliced two of the biggest galls from the stems. These he stuffed into our tin can worm container.
Back at the log, we prepared to bait our hooks. Grandpa took the wine cork and cut it neatly into two equal rounds. He cut side of each round part way through, so that the braided line, could be slipped through the cork slice, a little wrap of fish line around each cork bobber kept the line in place. Each cork was set on the line about a foot and a half above the hook.
Grandpa's big rough hands then turned to our baits. One hook he baited with the now still bumblebee. He pushed the hook through the thick thorax so that the bee hung upright as if it was flying.
"That's yours Robbie," he said, swinging the line out with its baited hook, so it plopped into the water about ten to fifteen feet out from the shore. "You hold that," he said, as he reached into the can for one of the galls.
I soon was mesmerized by watching the little half-cork floating in the center of a little ring of ripples in the water. That day I learned how to strike the hook when that cork jiggled. A shoal of small yellow perch, each about six or eight inches long and would hit the bait with a rush and take the cork bobber down below the surface dragging the line down and away. I caught two fish on the bumblebee and then I turned to the worms. Grandpa showed me how to drape them onto the hook so they would "look natural" in the water. That day, in a short time, we caught a nice string of fish
It was simple and joyful to raise the tip of the long pole and hook the struggling fish. A simple turn of the body brought the flapping, flopping, vertically black-stripped fish to the grass patch, where grandpa released it from the hook.
Before we had our first fish he had ready in his pocket a two yard length of linen line with each end tied to the center of a two-inch long sharpened stake. He had cut the stakes from a dry willow branch. One of the small sharpened stakes he slipped through the fish's gaping mouth, past the red gills and out through the hard gill cover of each fish. Then he pushed the other stake into the soft earth close to the water's rippling edge. To keep the fish fresh, he tossed the still flapping perch back into the shallow water where it tugged the line taught, trying to escape into deep water.
That morning, we caught a dozen small perch and happily carried the dripping still flapping fish home to be breaded and fried to crisp, moist perfection in grandma's big iron frypan.
The episode never left my consciousness. I was as well hooked (on fishing), after that day, as all those active tugging perch---for the rest of my life. As I write this, I can still see, the pond, feel the bump of the fish on my line, see their little torpedo-shaped, flapping bodies, fifty years later. And I can still remember the taste the fresh moist flesh of the fine little fish that made our supper that night.
On other days, we fished the Spring Pond with grubs from the goldenrod galls. We caught white cabbage butterflies with small nets and sometimes even big moths. These were impaled a tiny wire hook with no bobber and floated on the water's surface to catch big Red Breast Sunnies. On other occasions we collected crickets, which we caught in little tin-can-traps placed under the arbor at night and baited with bread crumbs. We collected "night crawlers" or earth worms by laying an old rug out on the compost heap near the garden patch, soaking it down with a bucket of water in the evening, and on the next morning lifting it up to find it active with moist, shining, iridescent earth worms. Sometimes running out of bait, we might turn over the old log right at the fishing spot on Spring Lake to look for critters under there. We often found black ground beetles and white grubs of various other insects in the rotted wood.
Smith's Spring Pond is still there, though a bit more weedy in the middle, (and now I can not vouch for the purity of the water) and though the old pipe has rusted away, ground water still seeps out of the same old wet spot to feed a stream of clear cold water into the pond. I haven't fished there in a long time, but I have seen some others fishing there...though with a lot more equipment than grandpa and I had, and of course no wriggly, natural baits that a kid could learn so much from.
Get the picture?
rjk
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