Hump Day

 

Who knows what a boy grandchild is going to do from moment to moment. It pays to be ready.

Recently, I wrote a couple of fishing articles whereby my grandson and I fished with Leon Mears of Mannford over manmade, sunken brush piles Leon has marked all over Lake Keystone. You fish with Leon for crappie, and you will spend the day moving from pile to pile until you find fish (which you will do eventually), and then you will catch fish. Leon and Jack Seawright, of Sand Springs, are the two best at this I have ever seen.

Whenever I watch these two at "work," I am reminded of that scene in “2001, A Space Odyssey” where Hal, the onboard computer for the spaceship, and the ship's captain get into an actual conversation, an uninflected, monotonal argument, really, at a critical point in the voyage as to whether the machine or the man is really in charge of the show. Jack and Leon are that "into" their fish locators while they are circling above and around a sunken brush pile.

They don't want you to talk to them while they are staring at their computer screens. They won't answer you if you do during the process of their divining the computer's message, and, yes, don't kid yourself: Today's modern onboard fish finders are computers, and modern anglers commune with them, somehow, like you and I do real people. I can't even turn one on properly. People, either, now that I think about it. 

Alan, for years one of northeastern Oklahoma's best high school wrestling coaches and a friend of mine while at Charles Page High School in Sand Springs, is of that ilk I referred to: He's a screenface reader, a fisherman who can put a bushel basket of fish, all kinds, into the boat, if he reads the screenface correctly, and he usually does he's been doing it so long.

Once found, Alan likes to drop a live bait, a shad, right down on top of the gamefish he is after, usually stripers and big bluecats. Game on.

It's true that once found, most fish are found hungry, barring some sort of weather upheaval. Apparently, even fish get seasick in bad weather, as it is fairly common for acres and acres of found fish to swim around with mouths clamped shut during such periods, but mostly not. You find 'em, you catch 'em.

Which reminds me. It's also true what the old timers used to say: Ten percent of the fishermen find ninety percent of the fish. Ninety percent of the fishermen find fish only ten percent of the time, and then usually by accident. "Finders, keepers". Hey, spare the rod, spoil the child. All of that old stuff is true.

What the late Carl Lowrance did in the 1950s in Tulsa with his little green box right after the war was like opening the door to a parallel universe. Electronic fish finding changed fish catching for all time.

Anyway, reminding Lane to call Alan "Coach", "Coach K", or "Mr. Alan", and to address Snook, Alan's longtime hunting and fishing buddy, with the same courtesy, and that I had a small switch in my waterproof tackle bag, we took off upstream from Pier 51 Marina near the dam. We headed up the Cimarron Arm of the lake to search out one of several underwater humps and old roadbeds, fish gathering places because of the deep water surrounding them, Alan has marked all over that part of the lake.

If we failed at all of those humps and roadbeds, Alan had more marked in the Salt Creek Arm of the lake. There are probably a hundred more in the Arkansas Arm of the lake. There are underwater humps all over Lake Keystone.

Baitfish, shad and ghost minnows, seek refuge on top of those humps from their predators, which lie about in deeper water. Sometime during the day, the gamefish are going to come out of that deep water and up onto the humps to get something to eat. Seek, and you shall find.

We did find them; on the very first hump we checked. I thought I could see them, but wasn't sure. Hal was my master, if not Alan's. I saw some funny looking marks (I thought) on the screen of Alan's locator. I asked a question.

"What's that?"

No answer. Oh, I forgot: Two's company, three's a crowd. We were circling 'round and 'round, tightly, in one midlake spot.

"Fish", Alan said, about five minutes later.

"What kind?"

"Bluecats, I think," he said about five more minutes later, then started tossing out small fluorescent-orange marker buoys about the size of a slice of bread, positioned the boat upwind of the markers, and asked Snook to toss the anchor overboard.

Time to fish, with cut shad, bloody and juicy. Toss the baits out there towards the edge of the marked hump, leave the reels on freespool, and wait to see what happens. Whuup! Somethin's happenin'. There goes the line.

Almost "just-like-that" we began to catch fish, the bluecats "Hal" told Alan were down there. The smallest, big enough for Conrad to fillet, weighed about a pound, but we caught them bigger, all the way up to the ten-pounder Lane reeled in; no switch needed.

Thanks, Carl. I still have your little green box; still use it, too. It doesn't talk to me like those big boy units do to Alan, Leon, and Jack, but it whispers. I swear it does.

When needed, it works just as good as the switch does.

Copyright © 2014 Conrad M. Vollertsen