Growing Up Fishing
My dad and I went fishing together a lot in the summers when I was a kid, as I’m sure is the case for lots of fishermen. I don’t recall my first time going but I do know that I loved it and it was what I looked forward to at the end of each school year. I actually became quite depressed when I started seeing “back to school” ads on TV because I knew my fishing days were almost over. Strangely, we never went fishing any time of the year but the summer. Ice fishing was foreign to me.
At any rate, my dad taught me what I call “still fishing”. Basically you pick a spot at the river and cast in your line and wait for a bite. The line had either a pickerel rig or a spreader with a couple of hooks and a sinker. We always fished with live bait, which were usually worms that we caught the night before which was part of the fun. Occasionally we used minnows but not too often. I had such a great time. It was always a crap shoot what we would catch which made it exciting. We always fished in the early mornings and used the exact same methods. It’s all I knew.
As I got older I started fishing with a cousin of mine who had the same passion of fishing as I did. We fished constantly. That’s when I bought my own fishing rod and tacklebox. My cousin and I even designed our own rigs which we called KayBee Rigs, which were just some sort of spreader. My first initial is K and his is B so that was our clever name. 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 really had no clue how to use lures really but we were excited to get them and not have to pay anything for them, not even shipping!
Over the course of a summer I ended up with a huge collection of top water bass lures, worth hundreds. I ended up having to buy a bigger box to handle all the lures that were being shipped to my house. 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…
Tags: fishing, fishing magazine, fishing shows, free lures