Fish Stories

I’m not sure how our family got started fishing.  Neither of my parents fished when they were kids although my dad’s Uncle Walter had a worm farm in his basement so maybe there was something in the genes.  All I know is that, when we were in grade school, most Sundays we packed cane poles, bobbers, bait and whipped-cream topped coffee cake (a bribe for my sister) into the car and drove to Hueston Woods Lake for a morning of fishing. 

My dad said real fishermen started early in the day so we usually got there way before the fish were up. Eventually we’d catch a few yawning, sleepy-eyed bluegills or sunfish or crappies –little, bony Midwestern fish who had been repeatedly hooked and thrown back so that their mouths had more piercings than a punk rocker.  They were too little to eat; but my brother, who was big on statistics, kept a running count of who had the most fish (him, naturally) and who got “skunked,” i.e. caught nothing.  (By the way, when we spend the holidays in Florida, Mark still keeps family fishing tallies and – surprise! – he’s still the big winner.)

On our first trip to Florida, we got hooked on ocean fishing from piers and bridges and kept it up for many years, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. As always, this activity started before dawn so we had to have junk food like Moon Pies, Hostess Sno-Balls and PayDays for an eye-opener. Those saltwater fish were NOT late sleepers, however, and they woke up full of energy. Sometimes your pole would be bent in half and the line would be moving all around the water so fast that you barely managed to pull a feisty, two-and-a-half inch fish to the surface.  And, while we caught plenty of little fish with hefty attitudes, we also caught stuff like flounder, sea trout and blue fish big enough to fillet and eat.  Pulling up the occasional crab, spiny blowfish or ocean catfish kept things interesting, especially if we were barefoot; and, since the standard ocean fishing rigs had two hooks, we occasionally pulled in two fish at a time! Step aside, Captain Ahab! 

Of course, while two hooks means you can catch two fish at once, it also means you have to bait two hooks at once so this is probably the right time to talk about bait and, yes, I’ve always baited my own hook AND taken my own fish off. Anyway, bait falls into three categories – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  The Good is what you use in Florida - raw shrimp like you cook for dinner – it’s clean, easy to cut up and doesn’t wiggle or squirt out anything yucky when you put it on a hook. Cut bait, meaning chunks of fish, is mostly Good although it leaves scales on your hands.

The Bad is little skinny red worms that have to be threaded over the hook while they wiggle or night crawlers which are even bigger and wigglier.  If you thread them right, you don’t have to replace them too often but some of the fish we went for had such little mouths that a hookful of worm was more than they could handle.  The Ugly is bloodworms and leeches. When you cut up North Carolina bloodworms, they squirt out their own blood which you offer up to the fish as a sort of gravy. On the other hand, leeches, used in Minnesota lake fishing, try to suck your blood before you can hook them (think Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen” only bigger.)  Enough said.

When Paul and I were dating, I introduced him to fishing.  On summer evenings after work, we’d take blackberry milkshakes and our cane poles to a creek in Indiana and pull in a few small crappies while the old guys around us caught sumo-wrestler sized carp and catfish with balls of crushed up, wet cornflakes.  Paul liked fishing so much that, on our honeymoon, we spent almost every morning in a small motorboat drinking Mountain   Dew, eating Goldfish and catching a bunch of little fish.  Paul also tells everyone that, with one bad cast, I hooked him in the eye but all I did was hook him just below the eyebrow so, after 40 years, he needs to get over that, plus he hooked himself in the ear not that long ago anyway.


My biggest catch that got away happened when Paul and I were canoeing the boundary waters between  Minnesota and Canada.  I was trying to free my hook from a snag on the bottom of the lake when I realized I actually had hooked a fish and not just any fish but a pike about three feet long. Netting a fish like that doesn’t work out well when your fishnet is sized for brook trout. While Paul was trying to figure out whether to scoop up the head first or the tail first or go for a jackknife position, the fish figured out how to break the line.  Oh well, I’ve heard that pike are pretty bony eating anyway.

Naturally, our kids enjoyed fishing when they were younger.  They remember the little sunfish they pulled out of Pike Lake and Lake Waynoka, the 10-pound redfish they hooked in the Florida mangrove swamps with Captain Bill and the huge haul of ocean spot (142 according to David) with Granny and Pa in North Carolina just ahead of Hurricane Bob.  I remember all four of us crammed into one canoe in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters trying to catch walleye while shooing away a turtle with a head the size of a grapefruit and a shell like an ashcan lid who was after our stringer of fish. Paul remembers fly fishing with both boys in the cold, sparkling streams of Wyoming until one year, after seeing the beautiful rainbow trout he’d caught shining in the sun just before they hit the frying pan, John decided he wasn’t crazy about fishing any more.

The great thing about fishing is that anyone can try it and even the most unlikely person can have success at it, as this final fish story shows.   One summer, we went houseboating at Dale Hollow Lake in Kentucky with two other families.  The kids were mostly into waterskiing and jumping off the houseboat into the water; but one of the dads, Danny, was all about fishing.  He spent most of every day out in the rowboat with a tackle box the size of Long John Silver’s treasure chest and every kind of lure and bait on the market, determined to hook a big one. He didn’t have much luck. 

By Sunday afternoon, everyone was relaxing on the boat and even Danny took a break for a nap when his wife, Lynette, decided to make her first attempt at fishing.  Baiting up with some left-over French toast over Danny’s disgusted protests (“Nothing’s going to bite on that!”), she threw a line off the side of the houseboat. Pretty soon, Paul and I heard her voice just above a whisper saying, “Danny, I think I got one.”

From inside the cabin came the sleepy reply, “B--- S---, Lynette.”

Again, a little more insistently came the plea, “Danny, Danny, I’ve really got one,” followed again by, “B--- S---, Lynette.  You’re snagged on the bottom.”

Paul’s curiosity got the better of him so he left his lounge chair and found Lynette, whose weight could bump up to 85 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner and whose arms were the circumference of two broom handles, struggling with a 15 pound carp.  Paul helped her net the fish and even got some photos before releasing it while Danny grabbed the remaining French toast and got back in his fishing boat.  And, unlike some fish stories, that’s the truth.