More big fish have been caught with exaggerated words than with a rod and reel.
My late brother was very short on tall tales. He was all business when it came to landing fish and always put his mouth to the action.
“Even a fish wouldn’t get in trouble if he learned to keep his mouth shut,” he once laughed.
Eddie could have landed a tuna in a tidal pool, he was that good. The guy had a magic wand for a rod and waved it around like some nautical Geiger counter.
Luck? Guess again!
“It’s all in the know-how,” he used to tell me after we both ended a junket on the lake. “You’ve got to have a feel for the fish.”
He was the guy who attracted the large-mouth bass with his fig-a-ma-jigs while I settled for the pesty little perch and sunfish.
You figure this out. We both had similar equipment and were fishing from the same boat, using the same bait. He’d be hooking the whoppers while I was getting the mosquito bites. He said I talked too loud and reeled in too soon. And he was quick to add salt to my wound.
“The tire always puts up a better fight than the overshoe,” he’d tell me.
Eddie played hunches. He once told me it all hinged upon his sleeping habits. If he woke up from the right side of the bed, he fished from the right side of the boat. If he awoke from the left side, he’d cast his line from that side of the dinghy.
And if he ever woke up lying on his back, he didn’t go fishing at all.
The guy’s been deceased for a decade but his legacy as a trusted angler continues to shine. I look to him for inspiration but I’m a lousy sleeper and never had his knack.
Talk about chagrin. I took my three-year-old grandson fishing. Because it was a windy day, we decided to cast from the dock. I had bought the kid one of these Mickey Mouse outfits from the children’s toy department.
After picking up some mini-crawlers from a convenience store, off we went to try our luck. He dropped his line straight down while I sent out a cast that looked like the TV pros.
Before I could say “boo,” the youngster’s rod bent like a boomerang. It called for a net and up it came—a feisty two-pound bass that had the kid doing a sun dance. Needless to say, I was skunked for the day and he pulled in five with his peashooter.
To add insult to injury, I asked him his secret and he taught me something I didn’t know.
“Maybe it’s because they come in close to eat the worms, papa,” he insisted. “I think you’re fishing in the wrong place.”
I’ve tried everything. Someone suggested a hula popper. A hula dance might have worked. The jitterbug was another futile attempt. The jitters kept them away.
And then, while perusing through a Sunday magazine, I came across the world-beater. It was called the “fish tech,” a mini-chemical light that attracts fish. It was supposed to be a scientific breakthrough that was activated by a mere jerk.
I get it—a jerk on one end giving a jerk to the other end. The promo also came with a TV endorsement, corroborated by the experts.
“That’s my kind of lure,” I reassured myself. “Now we’ll see who nabs all the heavies.”
I sent away for not one but a box. It arrived a couple weeks later and out I went, determined to make a sweep. It worked. Boy, did it ever! I wound up catching every single “minnow” in the lake.
“Go back and get your Dad,” I said upon releasing them.
I’m not big on eating fish, either. Matter of fact, I even hate changing the water in my fishbowl. Others thrive upon it. On occasion, we’ll frequent a fish eatery and I’ll go for the chicken. It’s the only other thing on the menu.
Mike and I were out fishing the other night at sunset and we started talking about some of the whoppers we’ve taken over the years.
“To give you an idea,” he said, “I caught one so big, it took a crane to get it to shore.”
“You don’t say.”
“What’s more, there wasn’t a scale around big enough to weigh this monster so I took out my camera and photographed it as a matter of record.”
“What happened after that?”
“The picture weighed 15 pounds.”
Tom Vartabedian
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