Some like to fish. Some could care less. I was born to fish.
Some of my earliest recollections are of the old “Henry” comic strip. Henry was forever fishing and carrying stringers of big fish that he caught. I saw those cartoons and stared in envy. How I wanted to catch fish like those.
I didn’t get much chance to fish until my family moved to Beckley, WV when I was about 5 years old.
There weren’t many farm ponds in that area. Because of the limestone and cavernous topography, the ground didn’t hold water very well. Ponds were few and far between, but there was a big reservoir about 15 miles out of town. Don’t know why, but we called it Water Dam. It was one of my favorite places on earth.
We had a small creek running behind our house and the banks were of dark gray mud and they were full of earth worms. On one splendid Sunday afternoon, Daddy and I went down to the creek where he plunged a shovel into the mud. As fast as he turned over the wet dirt, I saw the wiggling worms, snatched them up and put them in a Maxwell House coffee tin. We had dozens of worms in short order. We didn’t have spinning rods at that time. Daddy had a Pflueger bait casting outfit that was useful if you had a two-ounce sinker, but not of much value when your only weight was a bobber and a sinker. So we used bamboo poles. Daddy had bought a half dozen and hung them on the side of the house to cure, then he rigged each one with a few yards of monofilament, a long shanked hook and a split shot or two. I sat in the passenger’s seat while Daddy slid the poles though the front window and into the back seat. It was my job to hold tightly to the poles so they wouldn’t blow away as we went down the highway and I held on tight.
I remember the smell of the air when he pulled into a shaded spot below “Water Dam.” It smelled like fish. Daddy thought it best to fish in the spillway of the reservoir, rather than in the large lake above. He thought the fish would be more concentrated and they were.
Daddy showed me how to a put a worm on the hook, skewered, not just speared through the middle. That way, the fish would not be able to pull the worms off the hook, or at least it would make it more difficult.
I skewered a pair of worms on the hook, then flipped the line and bobber a few feet from shore and waited, and waited, and waited some more. It seemed like forever, but it was probably less than a minute when the little cork bobber began to dance in the surface. I had a bite and jerked the line.
Daddy patiently said to wait, wait until the cork goes under and disappears, then set the hook.
How could anyone wait during a time like that? But I did, and got another bite. The bobber stood up straight, then plunged out of sight. I lifted the pole and felt something tugging.
It was a nice bluegill, maybe 6 or 7 inches and I pounced on it once it flopped on the ground. I held the fish in deep admiration. My first fish. What a thrill. Daddy helped me take the hook out and we put the fish in a bucket, soon to be filled with lots more bluegills and even a few bass.
On the ride home, Daddy stopped at a country store and we each got a candy bar and a Pepsi. A fellow gets hungry after catching all those fish.
That night, I fell asleep still thinking about that amazing day. A day when a father and his young son went fishing at a place called Water Dam.
Yes, I was born to fish.