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Loneliness of This Wilderness Reaches Deep

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  I don’t know how many walleye there are in Kenoji Lake and its tributaries way up north in Ontario. What, millions? Hundreds? Certainly hundreds of thousands, wouldn’t you think? So little fishing pressure does it get in any one short season.  These fish swarm in water where the “catching season” is cancelled out by nearly eight months of winter, and two hours flying time between points “A” and “B”. Civilization? There is none, unless you count the single cabin you are in for your stay. There is a radio phone. Hello. You can use that in case of an emergency, or try a smoke signal.  Isolation: It’s one of the main reasons we go there. Well, that and the cool weather, and the fishing. Go there and you are going to catch some fish, and some more fish, and some more fish, and ..... well, you might eat a few of those golden walleye fillets, too. Maybe. You didn’t pack along any frozen pizzas, did you?  No, we did not, although we could have. Mike and Renae Henry’s Pipestone Lake Fly-In Ou
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Along the Arkansas: It's About Time

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  We mark time in different ways out here on Baker's Branch. Here's one: scorpions. When I lived near Capistrano, it was the swallows in the spring. In Pacific Grove it was the monarchs in the fall on the way to Mexico clustering orange in the seaside pines. Out here on Baker's Branch it's the little honey-colored scorpions in the dangdest places imaginable all over the house, and usually two weeks to the day before the first real cold weather of autumn. I don't know how the little "jabbers" mark their seasons so accurately; all I know is that they do. Everybody who has lived in this house has been stung by the little %$#&*^**! except my son Rode and me, and we've had our close calls. Pam and Sarah have been nailed, twice. Apiece. When they were little, getting Sarah and Rode ready for the drive to town and school was a daily exercise in chaos with Pam in charge. Super Mom, but she couldn't be at all places all the time. I always told her she w
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It’s All About That Bait

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  Bait. We need bait. Have you got any? Well, then, if you don’t, then you need some, too.  It’s all about bait. Everything. Not just fishing.  I do not know how much bait I have gathered in my life, starting at about age five. In weight? Time spent? All wasted? It is incalculable. I am still doing it.  The other day when my grandson Lane Webster, and his cousin Ethan Sartin, of Sand Springs, came out to our place to spend the night on the Branch, I promised to take them fishing. That was my end of the deal. Pam’s end of the deal was to feed them better than they deserved.  “I’ve never eaten curry before,” Ethan said.  “Wow!”, Lane said, “It’s my favorite!”  “I thought meatballs were,” Pam said.  “Yes!” Lane said, “Them, too!”  I told them if we were going to go fishing, then they were going to have to gather bait, that was their end of the deal; that I was not going to pay for bait with today’s dollars.  I didn’t care: I told them they could gather grasshoppers (few and far between wi
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In the Hot Summer, You'll Find Cats on the Rocks

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It’s light enough, now, to thread a needle outdoors at six in the morning, and cool enough to make you wonder why anyone ever complains about the heat in Oklahoma. Concrete workers, and roofers, know this. So do cat fishermen.   In July, in the hot, hot summertime, in the rocks, you’re going to find the catfish, three species, spawning; no roofers or concrete workers. If you do see the latter, just keep moving, gaze averted.   One cool morning this week, right after a pleasant nighttime shower, you would’ve found me there. I was catching fish, nice, fat channel cats up to about three to four pounds; one bigger that broke me off. Channel? Blue? Flathead? I don’t know. I was using live bait, so it could’ve been any of those three mentioned, the flatheads almost always preferring live bait to dead. It was big, whatever it was.   I say “live bait,” and that would include earthworms and crawdads, wouldn’t it? Over the years I’ve caught more cats in the rocks using what they call “market shr
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Pass It On: It's What the Best People Have Always Done

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  The way today’s news and current events are reported, it’s easy to forget that there are still more good people out there than bad. I was reminded of that this past weekend when I met with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years and met a new one I had never heard of. The first was Josh Lamb, certainly one of the toughest ever kids to wrestle for the Charles Page Sandites, and the other was an older gentleman, Barry Quackenbush, with a heart for others as big as Josh’s own. I knew Josh when he graduated from Page back in 1990. I never had Josh in class, but had taught many of his relatives, a stalwart bunch, all. In that time and place, everybody seemingly knew Josh, his reputation as a two-time state qualifier on the mat and knew him as well to be as friendly off the mat as he was ferocious on it, all of that while getting around on two bad knees you wouldn’t have handed off to your worst enemy. Josh was never a complainer, smiled all the time (off the mat), and was tough, tough, tough
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Don't Give Up On Shad Just Yet

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  Has shad died off this past winter? Sure. It was supposed to happen, and will again some winter down the road. Will it affect your ability to catch fish this summer on Lake Keystone, the Arkansas River, and other area lakes? Probably, but maybe not in a negative way. Hold off on your crying and moaning at least until early June when the first extensive fish catching reports will begin turning in the evidence of the extent of the die-off damage. It's possible as I just suggested, the die-off could work in your favor. Maybe.   Shad, two species, are the forage base of several different sport species found all over Oklahoma. Those two shad species would be both the gizzard shad and the threadfin shad. Without those two shad species swimming around in Oklahoma lakes (and rivers), fishing as we know it, all of it, and I'm talking about the fishing industry, boats, tackle, marinas, etc. as I am anything else, would not exist. Without food to eat, shad, gamefish cannot exist.   To b
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Time for Stripers?

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  It’s not weather, alone, that governs bird migration autumn and spring. It’s the amount of daylight in the sky. I’ve watched skeins of ducks and geese fly into the teeth of advancing cold fronts straight out of the north when the days lengthen in spring. In fact, I watched it happen last week on a trip to a family funeral in Nebraska. My three brothers and I were there to bury Dad. My brother Vernon and I drove with our wives straight north on Highway 81 out of Edmond into that southeastern corner of Nebraska often referred to as the Rainwater Basin, so low and waterlogged is the country there at this time of the year because of the winter’s melting snows. Roadsides in every direction were only recently opened, and three-foot snow drifts were piled high. Grandpa Harry Vollertsen had a dairy farm there that started our father’s life, and consequently our own. Ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes choked every available body of water, no matter the size, as far as you could see. If you loo
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