How to Fish

Pam and I took the grandkids on a “vacation” last week. We took them to Branson, Missouri. We deserved the vacation, they didn’t. They got the vacation, we didn’t.

You’ve herded four kids for a week, ages four to sixteen, hundreds of miles from home, without them getting killed, and so you know what I’m talking about. Pam made breakfast and dinner there in the cabin on the shore of Lake Taneycomo every day, clothed them (the sixteen year-old managed that on her own, it took hours), and then made the rounds of all the water parks, Silver Dollar cities, Dixie Stampedes, and bumper car parks known to man. She drew the line at tattoo parlors.

I went fishing. Taneycomo, in my boat. Everyday. By myself. Pam will get a medal, someday, in heaven. I never will. You have to show up to get the medal, right?

I deserved at least a limit of trout (four on Taneycomo). I got only one: not one limit, one fish, all week. Which, thinking about it, is probably one more than I deserved.

When I left my home water last week, Keystone, a friend had just told me of all the dead stripers he was finding in the lake. It’s been well known for years that Keystone starts losing stripers between five and ten pounds in late July when water temperatures reach 90°. The combination of too high (for stripers) water temps and consequent reduced oxygen levels kill big stripers (not the small ones) in wholesale lots. The lake begins to stink from all the floating carcasses.

The same friend had taken water temperatures down as deep as fifty feet beneath his boat and found eighty-six degree temperatures all the way to that depth. Deadly on big stripers.

This is the time of year I usually start fishing local creeks in a float tube or drive to Missouri to fish the spring fed creeks and nearby Arkansas frigid, tailwater, trout fisheries. Those of us that live right here are within an easy, scenic, four-hour drive of some of the best cold-water fishing in America. I access it at every opportunity in July and August.

There are numerous lakeside cabin-resorts with “efficiency” arrangements on both sides of Taneycomo, a mile from downtown Branson allowing you to save on meals. Pam and I first went to one of these places (Cloud Nine, now gone) forty-plus years ago with Doc and Renee Holliday. We caught trout “like who laid the chunk” without a boat while fishing from the resort’s dock.

Grandson Lane Webster, fourteen, stood it as long as he could. He was born with serious fishing instincts nurtured by his father, Adam, his other set of grandparents and me. It’s possible, genetically, he never had a chance play the flute or violin.

All those shows, rides, water parks, etc., had a limit, and one night after a plate of Nanna’s chicken tetrazzini, Lane piped up, “Papa when are you going to take me fishing?”

“When do you want to go?”

“Tomorrow.”

“How about right now?”

“It’s dark.”

“ I’ll go along with you, protect you from The Creature.”

“What creature?”

“The one from the Black Lagoon.”

“Papa.”

You go to bankside in the evening anywhere on the White River below a tailwater in Arkansas or Missouri in July and August, and you’re going to see, and feel, one of the creepiest fogs you’ll ever encounter between here and the Black Lagoon. They’re more predictable than any evening fog in San Francisco and twice as creepy as any fog in London.

We set up dockside the other evening much the same as Doc and I had all these years ago: Rods, reels, four-pound line, size twelve bait hooks, quarter-ounce bell sinkers, and Powerbait. Catfishing for trout, rod holders, fishermen (just two, not counting the Creature) reclined (one of us) in Adirondack chairs.

Trout slipped out of the water and up into the air all around us at periodical moments in the dark, foggy night. Or was that sound the Creature? If it was, he didn’t like Powerbait, and I would, on occasion, remind Lane that that was not a point in our favor.

“Papa. Stop.”

Maybe fifteen minutes of no takes on the Powerbait, Lane wondered aloud would one of the spoons in my box work after dark. “Try that brass-colored Little Cleo. Used to work great up here,” I said.

“After dark?”

“Try it. Maybe you’ll snag something big and ugly.”

“Papa.”

On what I counted as the fifth cast into the foggy dark, Lane did indeed snag something big, at least.

Whatever it was stripped line like crazy, making the reel’s drag sing. It ran way out into the lake. Then it ran under the dock. Then it ran out into the middle of the lake again. Then it was gone, line blowing in a light, foggy breeze.

Broken off? No! It had been running straight at the fisherman, still on! A marlin couldn’t have done it better. Lane had to reel like crazy to gather in all the loose line. Then, everything tight again.

Finally, color, deep in clear, dark water under dock lights. Then, the net, and a big, fat brown trout flopping on the dock.

“I’ve never caught a brown trout!”

“Now you have. Hand me that scale outa’ the blue bag.” Pause. “Hmmm. Says right here, ‘two-pounds and a quarter’ “.

“Could I call it three, Papa? Would you?”

“I would. It doesn’t say that, but I would. Your fish. Do what you want. What happens in Branson, stays in Branson.”

Two days later we were home, and Lane’s dad was at our house on another mission. I asked him if he knew about Lane’s nice brown. He did. Got a cellphone picture.

“How big did he say it was?” I asked.

“He said it didn’t weigh three pounds.”

There you have it: The kid’s a genius, maybe, and a fisherman for true. Twenty years from now, what number do you think people will remember?

 © 2014 Conrad M. Vollertsen