One Last Fishing Trip Before School

 

It was Leon’s idea, and it was a good one. Never miss an opportunity to take a kid fishing, and “charity” begins at home.

Leon Mears, of Mannford, and I have grandsons, Barrett (“B”) Andrews and Lane (“Rooster”) Webster of Sand Springs, playing on the same youth league baseball team. One day towards the end of this year’s season, at the ballpark, hot July, Leon suggested we take the boys fishing before school started.

We agreed that right before school started in August would be an optimum time. The year’s last freedom for a couple of twelve-year-olds, an essence Leon and I understood well, still being twelve years old ourselves. Last week, we picked a day to meet at Keystone Ramp on Lake Keystone.

A fishing trip with Leon as captain is really a “hunt” of sorts. First you hunt live bait with a cast net, and then you hunt secret brush piles with a depth sounder/fish locator. Trips with Leon are always fun for me outside the angle of actually catching fish. I can’t ever remember a trip with Leon when fish did not come into the boat, but I learn something every time I watch hm dial-up bait and fish structure, amazing stuff.

We started the morning netting ghost minnows in a windless cove on the Cimarron Arm of the lake, caught hundreds which the boys helped load into an oxygen activated bait tank, laughing, and chasing leaping, flipping escapees all over the boat’s deck. So far as being an escape from life’s schoolboy pressures, the day could have successfully ended right there, but of course there was more. There’s always more with Grandpa Leon.

Bait onboard, Captain Leon ordered the buckling of life jackets, fired up the ninety-horse, and brought the big, center console Crestliner up onto plane, and headed for the Arkansas Arm of the lake and one of his secret brush piles.

I couldn’t tell you, exactly, where one of his dozens of brush piles are located, and I wouldn’t for a fistful of twenty-dollar bills if I could. Leon uses a Lowrance side-imaging locator on his console, and another smaller, simpler unit by the same company on his boat’s foredeck, to locate the brush piles.

When the brush is located, Leon sets the anchor upwind so that the boat drifts right back over the fish-holding cover. Break out the rods, boys. There’s fish here.

Leon, and other Keystone anglers who employ the practice, spend literally hours and days of intense labor dragging sizeable piles of organic cover to “bait” their spots with fish-producing brush. Why would I give away the location of these spots to people who are already trying to steal the labor of Leon and others like him? Not me. Due diligence, and good electronics, and you can find the brush on your own.

Besides, the Fisheries Division of the Oklahoma Wildlife Department, in a little-known effort, is currently placing good public brush piles all around Lake Keystone, has for some time now, and is marking them with easily spotted marker buoys. Leon fishes those, too, and helps with volunteer labor to help place and build them when asked.

We had a light north wind on the day mentioned. I hate a north wind of any kind when fishing. I don’t care how light. You might do well with them; I never have. We didn’t this day.

The fish came to the hook eventually, but slowly. We moved when bite less, something Leon is all in favor of on slow days. There’re just too many brush piles to stay anchored over one “dead” one. Let’s move boys. Reel in.

We had maybe a half-dozen “Conrad keepers” (fish barely big enough to provide a fillet) at the next hole, when Lane’s rod, baited with a small jig head and inch-and-a-half long ghost minnow, bent double all the way to the waterline. Fish on, and then some.

I thought he probably had on one of Keystone’s many big blue cats, and said so.

“Flathead,” Leon said succinctly, and he was right. About a ten-pounder so far as we could tell without weighing it, when Lane finally (finally!) brought the fish to the net. Happy, happy, happy, all around.

“Leon,” I asked, curious, “how did you know that fish was a flathead and not a blue?”

“About ninety percent of the cats I take off of brush piles are flatheads. They like to lie around in that brush, not moving, until something swims by they can grab. It’s the way they hunt. Blues like to move around in more open water.”

That was good enough for me. I had learned something. I nearly always do when I fish with Leon. Imagine what “B” must be learning about fishing with his grandfather. Stuff that won’t show up for years, yet, on the radar screen, but it will most assuredly.

“B” and Lane, together, put maybe a dozen nice eating-sized crappie into the boat, but it had been an arduous process. Lots of fruitless moves, full of great expectations. Leon had had enough.

“You boys want to catch some big ol’ gars?”

Three twelve-year-olds screamed, “Yeah!” in unison.

Leon knew a place. We were off to see the wizard, with the wizard. Not a school building to be seen anywhere on the horizon.

Copyright © 2014 Conrad M. Vollertsen