More Badass Than I Look
My hero Yvon Chouinard has written and talked about intentionally using one fly with Tenkara exclusively for over a year. He would change size and pattern, but always a pheasant tail and partridge.
Unintendedly, I have fished most of my life exclusively with Rapala floating gold or silver lures-also in various sizes. The one deviation from this color pattern is a mackerel one for stripper fishing in the Atlantic.
My memories of fishing really have no beginning...they just are. We fished ALOT and OFTEN when I was growing up. We went as an extended family every Saturday night. We would pack up sandwiches and assorted snacks or cook hot dogs over a beach fire. I started out using a cane or bamboo pole and a nightcrawler. One of my earliest memories is of going with my father to his boss's farm and fishing from a rowboat on the farm pond. I caught a bull head/hornpout and as it was swinging on the line in the boat waiting for my father to take it off the hook one of the barbs stuck me in the knee. I fondly remember fishing at Lake Algonquin also for bull head with my grandmother, parents, uncle and cousin. I graduated to an open face spinning reel- one of which took a swim in the Sacandaga after a humongous carp tore it from the shore, my fully clothed and shod father, madly running in after it until the water got too deep. We regularly fished Abenaki, Lewey, Northville Lake, Nancy Pond and the Mohawk River. We spent time on the lake in our boat drift fishing with crawlers and red and white spinners for walleyes. In those halcyon days things were cheap, you could buy cans of soda for ten cents apiece or twelve for a dollar. When the can was empty you simply sank it to the bottom of the lake-we weren't yet woke to what we were doing to ourselves and the environment. Eventually the old and temperamental Johnson Sea Horse had more bad days than good and was retired.
It was around this time that my father and I started fishing by the bridge that separates the little lake from the big lake in Mayfield (NY). The genesis of my decades long dance with the Rap. We would go after supper, him on one side of the causeway and me on the other (usually the left). We caught small mouth, largemouth bass, pumpkinseed, chub, pickerel and crappie; all catch and release. It was so gratifying to start with a fresh out of the box lure. By the end of the evening that lure would have teeth marks and scrapes all over it. This is where I bested my phobia of bats. At sundown was the best fishing. It is also when the dinner bell rings for bats to start their nightly mosquito banquet. They cruised with mercurial precision around my ankles, so close and so fast I could feel their wing beats.
I would steel myself and coach myself through with the age-old angler affirmation "Just one more cast". Eventually, darkness would require us to relent. Depending on the veracity of the fishing, I forgot about the leathery wings at my ankles.
Decades hence I continued to fish with Rapala. A catch and release enthusiast, I bend the barbs back and remove one of the treble hooks. I play around with the depth by cadence of retrieval and entice hits by twitches and jerks of the line. It's not often that I am skunked. My catches are not record- setting, although I did simultaneously catch two small bass on the same lure at the same time once! I endured an ice fishing trip with a guy who stated he would rather fish all day and experience a single catch as long as it was superb versus a busy day of flags with "junk fish" on the hook. I will attest that begets an undoubted tiresome day.
The joy is in the process not the outcome. Rapala Forever!
