Fishing

Roger

I don't know if there is a single person that reads my blog that likes to fish...well, other than some family members.  When the kids were young, we started wading the creeks and fishing with our ultra-light rod & reels...Roger and I would fish and the kids would fish and/or play.  There is not much that is more exciting than have a small mouth hit your lure...they jump out of the water and fight like crazy.  But as far as fight, if a blue gill got as big as a bass, they would be hard to land.  Some of them really fight.

This is Sarah and one of her friends...

But what I am leading to is, I want to go back and visit childhood.   Reading that exerpt from Where the Red Fern Grows the other night made me remember days gone by.  Especially fishing and how much fun we had.

When we were kids and wanted to go fishing, we never even thought about fishing lures.  I don't even remember how old I was before I fished with a Zebco rod and reel.  Over by the creek that ran along the edge of our property, reeds grew.  We called them reeds, anyway.  They were like regular bamboo...only grew 8 or 10 feet tall and grew there wild.

Whenever we wanted to go fishing, either we had one already cut, or if needed would go cut one and bring it home.  We would tie our fishing string to the little end and wind a few yards around the end, and tie a hook  and sinker to the other end.  I don't remember if we used a bobbin or not...I think we did.

Then for bait, we would find some kind of can, put a couple inches of damp dirt in the bottom, and dig our own redworms.  (You night call them earthworms) I don't know why, but sometimes mom threw some water off the back porch...I don't recall why or if it was just something that happened every now and then.  I am almost positive our kitchen sink had a separate drain...rather than draining into our septic tank.  It drained out and went out under the porch and on down to a ditch.  It was buried, of course, but there was an access outside, out far enough not to be under the kitchen porch.  And when mom threw water out the back, it would be by that access...

Well, right around that area, we could usually dig and find worms because of the dampness.  And another favorite place to look was under anything that had been laying in contact with the ground for a while.  We had clay ground, so it did not dry up quick, and usually if we could find a chunk of wood or board laying like that, we could find a few worms under it.

We would find as many as we could in a short amount of time, and then go fishing.  Usually to this little tiny pond...

Those days were such fun...we never caught anything big enough to eat...we didn't care.  It was fun way to spend a summer afternoon...and fishing just sounds like so much fun right now.  I guess in this bitter cold weather, even mowing the yard has some appeal value.