Growing Up Fishing
When I was just a kid, my dad took me fishing several times each summer. The fishing trips were the highlight of my summer and I looked forward to the end of the school year. Strange, I don’t remember my first time fishing but I do recall practicing casting in my backyard on the days that my dad didn’t take me. The end of the summer, when talks of going back to school began, were always really depressing for me. If I recall, it was my only real passion. Strangely, we never went fishing any time of the year but the summer. Ice fishing was foreign to me.
I was taught one fishing technique only, which I later called “still fishing”. We would simply sit in one spot on a lawn chair and cast our line and wait for the fish to bait. It’s seriously all we ever did. I think it’s all my dad knew. The line had either a pickerel rig or a spreader with a couple of hooks and a sinker. We used worms usually but occasionally we would go get minnows as well. Those days are unforgettable. It was always a crap shoot what we would catch which made it exciting. It wa always morning fishing that we did and we always used the same exact methods. It’s all I knew.
Well, eventually we stopped fishing together and I started fishing with my cousin who shared the passion. I got my own tacklebox and fishing rod and we even started making our own rigs which we called KayBee Rigs. We got the name from taking our initials. Mine is K and his is B. We continued to “still fish” because we assumed we could only fish other ways from a boat or in a pond.
Anyway, we watched lots of fishing shows and mailed away for all the free offers where we got magazines and free lures. We weren’t exactly sure how to use these lures at all, but it was exciting to see all the different things that people used to catch fish other than the rigs, hookers and sinkers that we were used to.
My collection of lures, mostly topwater bass fishing lures, grew quickly from the free offers and I ended up with a collection worth probably 2-300 dollars. For some reason, topwater lures just appealed to me. These lures stayed dry in the box for many years. I wasn’t confident fishing them, I really didn’t know how. Years later I finally started fishing them and what a whole different experience for me!
To be continued…
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