Category Archives: Fishing With Family and Friends

Summertime Fishing As A Kid

Summertime fishing during my pre-teen years was always fantastic – whether I caught anything or not. From fishing for tiny cats and bream in the branch below my house to riding my bicycle to local farm ponds to try to catch bass, I fished almost every day.

Dearing branch provided some of my early learning experiences about fish behavior. When we were not damming it up or swimming in it, we fished. In a small branch you get up close and personal with the fish. I could watch how they used stumps, limbs in the water, current and other structure to hide and get food. Fish in big lakes act much the same way, just on a large scale. And hopefully, the fish are larger also!

I made my own “flies” for fishing the branch. It was quite a thrill the first time I got a six inch branch minnow to hit one of my creations of chicken feathers and sewing thread. I am sure the action of making it vibrate on the top of the water like a fallen insect was more important than the way it looked, but it worked. I thought I was really an artist, but found I needed bought lures to catch bass, my favorite.

To this day my bass boat is loaded with way more tackle than a dozen people could use in a week. One of my first tackle boxes – and I still have it – was a huge Old Pal box about two feet long. My folks got me a basket for my bicycle one Christmas and had to look all over Augusta to find one big enough to hold my tackle box.

With my tackle box in the basket and my rod and reel across the handlebars, I was ready to go to any pond within three or four miles. If I caught any fish they dangled on a stringer from one handlebar on the way home. I hardly ever went alone, my two friends and I traveled in a pack when we went fishing. That added to the fun.

I always had a few hooks, some line and a couple of sinkers and corks in a little box in my pocket. With my trusty – or maybe rusty – pocket knife I could cut a limb and be fishing in minutes. If there was a cane patch nearby I was in heaven with a real cane pole!

One summer my folks rented a cabin at Vogel State Park for a week. I could not wait to get to the clear mountain stream full of trout and try out my flies. I was eight years old and I knew those rainbows I had read about would just eat up my creation. How wrong I was!

After a couple of fruitless days of fishing the stream in front of the cabin and catching nothing, even with the live worms I had given in and tried, I decided the lake a mile or so downstream was where the fish were hiding. I also thought I needed to be there at the crack of dawn to catch them. I swear I told my folks I was going fishing early the next morning. I think they just didn’t remember with all the vacation excitement, but they were quite relieved when they found me mid-morning, sitting on a rental boat tied to the bank at the marina, catching tiny bream and bass on my earthworms and cut pole.

I had gotten up before anyone else and walked to the lake to fish. My parents found me when they asked a couple of teenage girls out walking around if they had seen a lost child. They told them of the “Huckleberry Finn” they had seen – barefoot but wearing a straw hat, sitting on the boat with a tree branch pole catching fish.
They didn’t get too mad. As a matter of fact, my mom told me years later that she didn’t worry about me as long as I was fishing. She thought a guardian angel watched over kids out trying to catch fish. They let me grow up pretty wild, and I thank them for it.

Camping Out

When you first realize you aren’t tucked in your own bed, your next waking sensation is the smell of canvas. Anyone who has ever camped in their back yard as a kid will never forget that smell. It meant adventure, freedom, fear and many other emotions all rolled into one. From the old army surplus pup tents to fancy Sears tents with floors, I spent many happy nights in them.

Camping out was one of the rites of summer while I was growing up. We organized our overnight stays as well as any expedition to climb Mt. Everest. Each of us had specific things to bring for the group, and each one of us also had their own private treasures. We brought so much stuff we could not have carried it further than our back yards.

Mess kits and matches were all we needed to cook our breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast over an open fire. The bacon was always half burned and half rubbery undercooked, but all delicious. Toast, as soon as it turned a perfect golden brown, was either dropped into the fire or left a little longer to blacken. Eggs stuck to the pan and had to be scraped off as they were eaten.

For supper, we discovered “hobo meals” at church camp. A hamburger patty was placed on a square of tin foil, sliced potatoes, carrots and onion stacked on top of it and all was topped with a hunk of butter. Sealed up and cooked on the campfire coals, it was moist and tender, I was told, if you didn’t stick a hole in the tinfoil while cooking it. I never had one cooked that way. Mine always managed to get stuck.

For desert we always had somemores. They were graham crackers with a Hershey bar and a toasted marshmallow on top. We go more on our hands and face than in our mouth, but they were still great, and you could lick for a long time and make the flavor last.

Sleeping was also an adventure. Each of us boys had our sleeping bags, which we placed directly on the ground for years. We got used to scrounging around until we got comfortable on the rocks and limbs we didn’t remove before spreading the bag out. Then one of us got an air mattress. What a joke. I do not remember even one that was still inflated shortly after blowing it up. We tried every time though.

Once we got the bright idea of sleeping on a lawn lounge chair. That worked if you didn’t mind the bar across your back all night long. And it was tough to roll over in your bag in the chair. We used them often, though. They were still better than the ground.

Something else I will never forget is the way your voice sounded when waking up early in a tent. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was the tent itself, but we always sounded funny to each other and ourselves. We never camped more than one night during the weekend because we needed the other night to recover!
Sometimes I think I would like to do that kind of camping again. Then I remember how much I ache getting out of a nice soft bed in the morning and realize backyard camping is best left to the young!

A Saturday Kids-Buddy Tournament and A Sunday Club Tournament At Bartletts Ferry

There is nothing quite like seeing the excitement on a kid’s face when they catch a fish. They light up and almost vibrate they are so happy. Last Saturday at the Spalding County Sportsman Club Youth/Buddy tournament at Bartletts Ferry three kids showed us that joy.

We were disappointed there were only three youth in the tournament, but it was well worth the effort to put on the tournament. Raymond English brought his grandson Preston and he won the youth side with three keepers weighing 3.39 pounds. Russell Prevatt’s grandson Bryson had two weighing 1.52 pounds for second and Zane Fleck’s grandson Dakota had three weighing 1.22 pounds for third.

I am glad they all caught fish. The fishing was tough but they worked hard for seven hours to land fish on a tough day. I will long remember watching Bryson, the youngest angler in the tournament at seven years old, bring a bag of fish up to the scales.

The weigh-in bag looked almost as big as he is and with water and fish in it, it was very heavy. Although he struggled with it, he wanted no help! He was so excited he couldn’t stop talking. It was great.

Kids win prizes rather than money and I was disappointed I didn’t have the tackle bags ready. I am trying to get some donations and will present the prizes at the next club meeting. Unfortunately, I have used up all the tackle I had collected for prizes.

In the Buddy side of the tournament Raymond and Preston won with five fish weighing 9.63 pounds. The way the tournament works is kids weigh in the fish, up to five 12 inch largemouth and any size spots since there is no legal limit on them, and the adult and kid combine their best five for the team weight. Spots have to be 12 inches long in the buddy tournament due to club rules.

A father and son were supposed to fish with me but due to a last minute problem they couldn’t make it, so I fished as a “team” by myself. I had three keepers weighing 6.49 pounds for second and my 3.70 pound largemouth was good for big fish. Russell and Bryson had four weighing 3.13 for third and Zane and Dakota had four weighing 2.25 for fourth.

Fish hit a little bit of everything, from Trick worms to spinner baits. I caught one at daylight on a spinner bait, one at 11:00 on a Texas rigged Mag 2 worm and the big fish hit a jig head worm at noon. The fish were scattered on the cloudy, cool day and there was not much of a pattern. I caught fish from one foot deep to 22 feet deep.

During the buddy tournament I decided to look for new places to fish and it worked. The first two hit on places I had never fished before, and the third one hit on a point that has always looked great but I have never caught a fish before, so I had quit fishing it years ago.

On Sunday ten members of the Sportsman Club fished our September tournament on Bartletts. After eight hours of casting we brought in 26 keepers weighing about 33 pounds. There were three five-fish limits and two people didn’t catch a keeper. We had six largemouth, 18 spots and two shoal bass weighed in.

I won with five weighing 6.98 pounds and had a 3.16 pound largemouth for big fish. Sam Smith had four weighing 5.41 pounds for second, Niles Murray had a limit weighing 4.87 pounds for third and his partner Raymond English had five weighing 4.57 pounds for fourth.

I started out where I had caught my first fish the day before but got no bites. Then I ran to where I caught my second fish and again got no bites. By 7:45 I was where I had landed the big one the day before and quickly caught a barely 12 inch long spot, then a largemouth the same size.

At noon I had fished a lot of places and still had just two keepers. In desperation I went out on a point and saw fish near the bottom, and used a drop shot worm to catch three keeper spots and several throwbacks. That gave me my limit with an hour left to fish, but they were all small.

For the last hour I decided to go to the point where I had never fished before Saturday but had caught a keeper that day. There were fish on the bottom and I missed some bites on the drop shot worm, and thought they must be bream. Then, with five minutes left to fish, the big fish hit. I didn’t think I would ever land it but managed to net it after a long fight.

This is my favorite time of year to fish. The weather is beautiful and fish tend to bite better. And boat traffic is supposed to be lower, since Labor Day is supposed to be the end of boating season, but it was not that way Sunday. The beautiful weather had a lot of pleasure boaters on the lake and I rocked and I rocked and rolled all day from their wakes.

Sounds of Summer

A recent article in the Griffin Daily News about the sounds of summer while growing up, written by a guy that grew up in a suburb, brought back many memories. Although he had some of the same memories as me, there were many unfamiliar to this country boy, and he did not mention many that were important to me.

He told of the different ways parents had of getting their kids home in time for supper. My parents blew the car horn three times. From our house on top of a hill I could hear that distinctive sound for a very long way. And I knew I better high-tail it home since my parents insisted the whole family sit down together every night for dinner.

I was too far from any neighbors to ever here them talking, or even yelling inside their houses no matter if the windows were open or not. But at night I did hear crickets, spring peepers, the sound of distance thunder that seemed to be present every summer night, and the clucking of chickens. Since we had 11,000 laying hens and kept lights on all night to encourage laying more eggs, that sound lasted all night.

Car sounds were very unusual after dark, and not very common during the day. Before I was school age the main road that ran in front of my house was dirt. Sometime around the time I started school the county put down tar and gravel. That made for a better road, but not much. The gravel was put down in a thick layer and gravel sprayed on it. The tar kinda kept the rocks in place.

The sounds of passing cars changed from a soft grinding in the sand to a crunching as the tires ran over the rocks, and an occasional clank when a piece of gravel was thrown up into the fender well.

It was not unusual for me to come in during the summer with tar on my feet. I wore shoes only on Sunday during summer vacation from school, and walking on the road after the sun heated the tar was guaranteed to get it on my bare feet. So the sounds of me fussing about mom scrubbing my feet with turpentine to get it off was pretty common, too.

We had something else in common, that city boy and me. Apparently he lived on the edge of the suburbs since he talked about damming creeks, building tree houses and camping out. I did all that, so the sounds of hammering and sawing were pretty common, as were the sounds a shovel of sand makes hitting the pile for the dam or being poured into croaker sacks.

I will never forget the sound a butcher knife makes slicing into a cold watermelon, then the crack as it is split apart. We ate watermelon at least once a week during the summer. Since we had a walk in cooler for the eggs we always had six or eight in there ready to eat.

The sound of bacon sizzling, eggs frying and the toaster popping up were daily indoor sounds. But the bacon and eggs cooking outside while we camped out sounded different, and better, somehow.

Another sound of the summer was the whoosh of daddy’s fish fryer under the carport. It was sometimes frying fish, but much more often it was boiling water to blanch corn, string beans, okra and other vegetables from our garden that mom was freezing. His fish cooker was home made out of an old wheel rim, with a pipe in the middle that the gas line hooked to. It put out a flame thrower like column of fire that heated things up fast.

One of the most important sounds of summer to me was the plop of a cork hitting the water, or the gurgle of a Jitterbug wobbling its way across the surface of a pond. Fishing was one of my favorite activities, even back then, and I went several times each week. It didn’t matter if we were fishing red wigglers dug behind the chicken house for bream or casting plugs for bass. I love it all, as I do now.

The sounds our bicycles made on the gravel and dirt roads, and the change to a whine when hitting asphalt ones, will always remind me of the fishing trips we made. My friends and I would ride our bicycles for several miles to farm ponds and spend a cool afternoon wading and catching supper.

I hope kids made some good memories of the sounds of summer this year.

Dads and Fishing

Dads do a lot for their kids. My father was not a fisherman, but I have some memories of fishing with him that become more special each year. The older I get the more I realize the sacrifices he made so I could fish, even though he did not like fishing.

We went camping at Clark’s Hill often and I will never forget a couple of trips. One of the first, when I was about 10, involved me, my best friends Harold and Hal, and our fathers. All six of us were in a wooden boat and the men were throwing Hula Poppers around shoreline cover while we boys paddled the boat.

Mr. Bill, Harold’s dad, caught most of the fish. He fished a lot and was much better at casting than dad or Hal’s dad, Mr. Bonner. Dad managed to catch a couple of bass but lost several more. The next week he went and bought a new rod and reel and several new Hula Poppers so that would not happen again.

I don’t think Dad ever used that rod or Hula Poppers. I still have a couple of them that survived my use over the years. Many times I tried to learn to use that old baitcaster and solid glass rod, but never got the hang of it. I am not sure what happened to it.

Another strong memory was a trip to Elijah Clark State Park. I had heard about fishing at night for crappie and white bass under bridges at the lake, and there was a bridge a few hundred yards downstream of the park. I talked daddy into renting a row boat and taking me fishing under the bridge one night.

I was so excited I could hardly stand it, and it felt like it would never get dark. We went to the area where they kept the row boats with our tackle, a bucket of minnows and a lantern as the sun set. I loaded the rods and tackleboxes into the boat while daddy got the paddles.

Daddy rowed to the bridge, tied up and hung the lantern over the side. I got my rod ready and looked for the minnow bucket. It was not in the boat. Daddy did not say anything, he just got the lantern in, untied the boat, rowed back to the park and got the minnows, still sitting where I had left them.

Although he had rowed us a couple of hundred yards each way for nothing, daddy never fussed at me for forgetting the minnows. After rowing back to the bridge we fished for several hours without a bite. I was just about asleep by the time daddy rowed us back to the park and took me to the camper for bed.

The only kind of fishing daddy seemed to enjoy was catching crappie around the bushes in the spring at Clark’s Hill. He would spend hours in a boat with my mom and me catching crappie. I realize now he was thinking about all the good eating and did not mind “wasting” time fishing since he was filling up the freezer with fish.

Daddy bought a 17 foot Larson outdrive ski boat for us in 1966. I loved to ski as a teenager but wanted to fish, too. I rigged up a wooden seat that fit over the front running light and had a drop down part for the trolling motor. I fished many days from that boat until I was able to buy my first bass boat in 1974.

When daddy saw my bass boat and how easy it was to fish from, he decided to fix up the ski boat for him and mamma. He built a nice platform with a swivel seat on it, and put a foot controlled electric motor on it. That worked great for easing around the edges and fishing for crappie. He was very good at putting things together like that and made a much better fishing boat than I was able to make.

I have a lot of fantastic memories growing up, and often wish I could go back and enjoy some of those times again. Fathers and children, don’t let any more time pass without making some memories of your own. Go fishing together and enjoy the time you have. It will be gone all too soon.

Summer Vacation and Fishing

Summer vacation. Those words were magic all during my school years. They were the words that opened up endless days of bare feet, fishing, building tree houses, visiting relatives and friends, and riding bicycles all over my end of the county.

The end of school meant no more early morning wake-up calls from mom and then sitting at the breakfast table staring at food I did not want. It meant the end of riding my bike almost a mile on pretty days to school or riding in the car with dad on the way to his job as principal. And no more seemingly endless hours of staring at books in the late afternoon when I wanted to be fishing or hunting.

We had a little ditty we sang – “no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers with dirty looks!” For some reason my teachers were always giving me dirty looks, mostly for talking about hunting and fishing during math, reading an outdoor magazine tucked into my notebook or trying to sharpen my knife during spelling!

Many summer days I would call one of my friends Harold or Hal and make plans. It was easy to call back then, you picked up the phone and told the operator two numbers. My phone number was 26. The phone would ring on the party line – one ring for Harold, two rings for the neighbor on my side of his house and three for the house on the far side. Sometimes a neighbor would answer the wrong ring and tell me Harold had already left for the day!

Our plans were simple – I would ride my bike to Harold’s house and meet Hal there. We would have our tackle box in the bicycle basket and rod and reel across the handlebars. After a quick stop in town for candy bars and cokes, we would head to a local pond. Fishing consisted of wading around and casting plugs or those new-fangled rubber worms for bass, sitting still watching a line for a nibble from a catfish or dunking live bait for bream.

The catfish bait was always my responsibility. We had 11,000 laying hens and some died every day. I could go out to the chicken house and quickly collect enough livers, hearts and gizzards with my pocket knife to last us all day. All the “innards” were put into a glass jar with a top so we could transport them without mixing them with our candy bars.

Live worms were a group effort. We usually met at my house and went behind one of the chicken houses where the water trough drained. One of us would stick a shovel into the moist earth and turn it over, and the other two would grab for red wigglers as they tried to get back into the ground. And old tin can could quickly be filled with all the worms we would need.

Catching fish was very secondary to going fishing. We often caught enough for supper for all three families, and cleaning them was our task as soon as we got home. But the fun of the trip was everything that it involved, and mostly just being with friends. If the fish didn’t bite today there was always tomorrow.

I can still feel the hot sun on my face and the cold water on my toes as I waded the upper end of Black’s Pond. There was an old channel in the upper end and the water was always cooler down in it. I was my own first depthfinder and temperature gauge! I learned the location of drop offs, stumps, hard bottoms and other structure by feeling it with my feet.

We also learned to pattern fish in those early days. There was one stump at Harrison’s Pond that always had a bass beside it. If I could cast my topwater plug just right, and work it up to the stump, I would always get a bite. Unfortunately, many times my line went over the little bush growing on the stump and I would have to wade out and unhook my only topwater plug, scaring the fish away.
Many times I want to return to those more simple times. Everything was much better back then, or so I remember. The sun was warmer, the water cooler, the candy bars more tasty and the fish harder fighting. Summer vacation made all my activities happier times.

I hope all school kids have as great a summer as I remember and make memories that will last them as long as mine have lasted me.

Beating the Heat Growing Up By Going Fishing

One of my favorite ways to beat the hot weather when I was growing up was to go fishing. Weather like we have had the past few weeks always brings back memories of those days, back when we did not start school until after Labor Day and could fish and enjoy life for a full three months during the summer.

From the time I was about 10 until I got my driver’s license at 16 I spent many wonderful summer days at local ponds. I would ride my bicycle to them, often traveling five or six miles to fish. Most of the time one of my friends was with me and we would make a day of our fishing trip.

My bicycle had a huge basket up front, big enough for my Old Pal tackle box. I would hold my Mitchell 300 reel and rod across the handle bars and head off. Usually we packed a lunch, and it mostly consisted of saltine crackers and Vienna Sausage or Ritz crackers and potted meat. Sometimes we carried sardines, but they were not my favorite at that age.

Drinks were a problem. Back in those days cans were unheard of and all drinks came in bottles. We did not have the small ice chests that are so popular now, so we would sometimes wrap our drinks in newspaper to keep it somewhat cool. Most of the time we just took a Mason jar of water along since a hot Coke was not real good, even at that age.

Riding to the ponds would make us very hot but we solved that as soon as we got there. Jeans and tennis shoes were the uniform of the day and as soon as we parked the bikes and got our tackle rigged up we would start wading. Easing around the pond in the shallows, casting ahead of us, we would carefully fish every bit of cover available.

I can still feel the mud oozing around my feet and the cool spots we would sometimes hit. It was amazing how the water would be real warm but suddenly we would find a pocket of cool water. Those were probably springs but we did not realize it then. Those spots were favorites to stand and cast from for a long time, even if nothing hit. We leaned where they were in each of the ponds we fished.

Now I watch a depthfinder on my boat to find underwater stumps, ditches, rocks and other cover and structure. Back then it was more personal. My feet were my depthfinder. Over the summer I would locate stumps, rocks, brush and ditches with my feet then fish them the next time we made a trip to that pond.

We learned to slide our feet along slowly, mainly so we would not disturb the fish, but also so we would not step off into a hole. It was not unusual to wade up to neck deep, especially when crossing a cove or ditch to get to the other side. As often as not we would have to swim some, doing a kind of dog paddle with our feet while holding rods and reels over our heads.

In those days catch and release was unknown, we practiced catch and hot grease. We kept and ate just about everything we caught. A stringer tied onto a belt loop always received bass and bream that hit our lures and we had to be careful wading with some fish following us around. We always worried about snakes trying to come eat our fish, but it never happened. I am sure the snakes were more scared of us than we were of them.

I learned early on not to wade too close to stumps that came above the water in the ponds. They usually had a small bush growing on them, and we were afraid of snakes. But the biggest danger were the wasp nest built on them. It is hard to run from wasps when wading chest deep, and, unlike a snake, they will come after you if you get too close.

When we took a break for lunch our wet clothes provided air conditioning and the ride home on our bicycles was cool and comfortable. There was no air conditioning at home, but there was a mother waiting to make sure we left wet, dirty shoes and jeans at the back door. I always hated to take them off but it helped knowing they would be waiting on me the next day for another fishing trip.

Finding Survival Food As A Kid

There are a lot of TV shows about surviving in the wilderness running right now. They have a variety of themes, from a father and son reenacting possible problems hikers, fishermen and hunters may get into and get lost to a couple put into a wilderness setting without anything, including clothes. All these shows take me back to growing up wild in Georgia, where we often tried to “live off the land” for a few days.

We were never really in a survival situation since home was just a few minutes away, but we liked to think we had to find food and shelter to survive. Since my friends and I lived in a rural area we were used to gardening, eating anything we could kill or catch and using nature. But being out in the woods pretending we had to survive was fun, especially knowing the comforts of home were close.

Our survival tools were our trusty BB guns and later .22 rifles and .410 shotguns, so getting squirrels, birds and sometimes rabbits was no problem. There are very few kinds of birds I have not eaten at some point but a few, like redbirds and bluebirds were off limits. And we never tried buzzards, for obvious reasons.

All kinds of plants were eaten, too. There was a weed that I never knew the name that grew all over the fields, and its roots were crunchy and had a nutty flavor. We usually ate them raw but often put them in squirrel and bird stew. One of us always had a mess kit along with its fry pan, pot, cup, knife, fork and spoon so we could cook things in a lot of ways.

Mushrooms grew wild but we were afraid to try them. We knew some were poison so we left all of them alone. But there were acorns, which tasted terrible, dandelions, poke weed and other plants we did eat. And hickory nuts were good if we could crack them open.

We never ate bugs and worms, we never got that hungry, but we did consider it. A few years ago on a trip up the Amazon River Linda and I took a tour of the jungle with a Brazilian military captain that taught survival skills to troops. He showed us a lot of different kinds of food from tarantula spiders to vines that held water.

At one point he cut a palm looking bush and shelled out a small nut. He said the nut, a palm nut, was edible and tasted like coconut. Then he split open the nut and showed us a white grub inside, saying protein was important and these grubs were good.

When he asked if anyone wanted to taste it I popped it into my mouth and bit down. It tasted like coconut. So I will eat worms and bugs, even if not starving to death. And I guess I would eat a buzzard if really, really, really hungry.

The branch provided several kinds of food but we didn’t try most of them. Crawfish were small and would not have made much of a meal but we knew we could eat them. And the small bream and catfish in the branch were so tiny we didn’t want to clean them. Under real survival situations both would make a good stew.

In the spring we even tried bird eggs. They were not bad boiled in branch water in our mess kit pots over a campfire. Since my family had 11,000 laying hens I usually packed some chicken eggs along to eat. That is not really survival but just keeping them whole taught ways to protect the food we found and how to handle it with care.

Our shelters were very simple lean-tos built by tying a sapling between two trees, leaning other sapling trunks against it and covering them with sweet gum branches with leaves. I doubt they would have stopped much rain but it was the best we could do with what we had, and we were proud of them.

One of the biggest problems folks on the survival shows have is making a fire, a necessity under survival conditions and for us boys in the woods. We tried rubbing sticks together, making sparks with flint and steel and using a magnifying glass. Nothing worked for us except the magnifying glass so we always had matches with us.

I spent hours dipping the heads of strike anywhere matches in melted wax to protect them from water. They were carried in a small box and could be counted on to produce a fire when scratched against a handy rock. I am not sure I could start a fire without the right tools but I know how it is supposed to be done.

Pretending to need to survive is fun but I don’t think I would want to do it under real conditions where my life might depend on my skills.

A Reunion Tournament To Kentucky Lake

Back in the late 1990s I started visiting a newsgroup, Recreation – Outdoors – Fishing – Bass (ROFB). Newsgroups were popular back then and there were thousands of them available. Each one was on a specific topic and you could go post messages to others with similar interest. They have pretty much gone now, being passed by with new forms of interaction on the net.

The guys on ROFB started having a get-together tournament on Center Hill Lake in Tennessee, called the Mid-Tennessee Classic. I could not attend since I was still working but I enjoyed reading about those trips. I planned on attending when I retired and had time to go.

In June, 2001 when I retired Steve Huber in Rhinelander, Wisconsin decided to host the North Woods Classic in the fall with the same group. He invited us to come to Rhinelander and experience the fishing there. So, on Labor Day that year, I hooked up my boat and headed 1100 miles north.

Those were great trips and I went to eight of them, as well as attending three of the Mid-Tennessee Classics. I made some good friends on those trips and got to fish with guys from all over the US. But the Tennessee tournaments ended after a few years and in 2009 Steve moved to Paris, Tennessee, ending the trips to Wisconsin.

Some of us still keep in touch through Facebook and emails and we decided to revive the Mid-Tennessee Classic this year, but on Kentucky Lake, near Steve’s new home. So a little over a week ago I hooked up my boat and drove 400 miles to Paris. We had a great time, renewing old friendships and making new ones. We ate together each night and I fished with a different person each of the three days I was there.

I had not fished Kentucky Lake since 1983 so it was like visiting a totally new lake, especially since we were about 40 miles by water from where I had fished so many years ago. I drove up on Wednesday and met up with Larry and Moe from New York and Steve Thursday morning for breakfast. We headed to the lake about 9:00 AM and Larry and I went exploring.

On a new lake I try to find something that looks familiar to the way I like to fish here, but after four hours I was very confused. Kentucky Lake is huge, over 100 miles long and over a mile wide where we fished, and it is very shallow near the bank in most areas. By 1:00 I had landed a few small bass, including the five Larry and I caught in 15 minutes beside one cypress tree in two feet of water on an island. Bass there have to be 15 inches long and they were hard to find.

A little after 1:00 I spotted something that reminded me of Clarks Hill – a gravel point at the mouth of a small feeder creek. When I got near it the water was about 10 feet deep a good cast off the bank, and there were button bushes in the water and a big willow tree hanging over the water. Larry and I started fishing and when I pitched a jig and pig under the willow I caught a 18 inch largemouth that encouraged me.

A few yards further down the bank I got a hit and landed a beautiful 19 inch smallmouth. That was really encouraging. Smallmouth have made a big come back there since 1983. That year, in a three day tournament I fished with 72 fisherman, exactly one smallmouth was weighed in. Now they are fairly common.

After fishing into a small pocket further down the bank Larry hooked a nice keeper largemouth that jumped then broke his line when it ran under the boat. I told him I knew where I would start the next morning. That night we had a great meal at a small BBQ place, sat around a picnic table at the motel and talked, then got some sleep.

Moe fished with me the next day and we headed to my honey hole first thing. But we could not catch a keeper even though baitfish were everywhere. At about 10:00 Moe got a keeper but all I could catch were short bass, so we decided to go somewhere else. While going under a bridge I saw current was running, a good sign, so we stopped and started casting to pilings.

We caught over a dozen short bass and I managed to land a very skinny 15 inch keeper. At least I would not zero! With an hour left to fish I told Moe I really wanted to go back to where we started and he agreed. With 30 minutes left to fish I caught a keeper largemouth off the gravel bank then got another keeper on a rocky point on it.

At weigh-in I had three weighing 5.5 pounds and was in first place, a big shock! That night we ate and shot the bull, and I drew Kevin as my partner the next day. Kevin is from Illinois and I had fished with him in Wisconsin so I knew we would have a good day. Of course we headed to my favorite place and Kevin quickly caught a three pound largemouth, a good start.

After a couple of hours I had not caught a keeper. We went into a very shallow pocket and I said it was way too shallow, but I got a hit by a bush in a foot of water and caught a short fish, then caught a keeper off the next bush. That seemed worth trying so we worked further into the creek, pitching a jig to very shallow bushes. By one I got a hit and landed a 4.5 pound largemouth.

We kept working that pattern and I caught two more keeper largemouth, lost two more that would have gone about three pounds each, and a smallmouth that was so close to 15 inches I really wanted to keep it but didn’t take the chance. With just an hour left to fish I was casting a jig head worm to the rocky point and landed a 17 inch smallmouth, filling my limit.

I was shocked at weigh-in when I had five of the eight bass brought to the scales. They weighed just under 13 pounds and my four pounder was big fish. So I won our reunion tournament, and really enjoyed seeing everyone. We are planning on doing it again next year!

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Saturday night I left Paris at 9:00 and arrived at the ramp at Sinclair at 5:00 AM for the Flint River June tournament. It was tough, with 15 members and guests landing 38 bass weighing about 50 pounds. There were two limits and one person didn’t have a keeper.

Larry Cook won with four bass weighing 6.10 pounds and had big fish with a 3.08 pounder. Rick Burns had four at 6.10 for second, Niles Murray had a limit at 5.76 pounds for third and my five at 5.68 pounds was fourth.

I was worn out but made it home and got some sleep!

How Did Missouri Wardens Find Missing Teen?

Found him! How Missouri DNR Mission Ready wardens helped find a missing teen

Published in Wardens in Action

By Joanne M. Haas/Bureau of Law Enforcement
from The Fishing Wire

The first thing Warden Supervisor Joe Jerich did when he found the shivering, wet missing 17-year-old canoeist in a remote area of Ozaukee County was think of what the teen’s worried mother needed.

“I handed him my phone and told him to call his mom,” Jerich said.

That was about 7:45 a.m. Thursday — about eight hours after a DNR Mission Ready conservation warden team responded to midnight calls to help a multi-agency effort find the boy who flipped his canoe in the swift waters of the Milwaukee River.

The calls roused Jerich from his West Bend home, and Wardens Ryan Propson in Appleton and Sean Neverman in Sheboygan County. Within minutes, Propson, Jerich, Neverman and DNR Pilot Michael Callahan were on their separate ways to join other local law enforcement agencies and fire departments in their search to find the missing boy.

They’re called Mission Ready warden teams – trained to answer calls for help at any hour and to stay with the mission until completed. The DNR Bureau of Law Enforcement has several of these specially trained teams ready to handle emergencies. In this week’s missing person case, the Tactical Flight Officer Team answered the call for assistance from the Grafton Fire Department in eastern Wisconsin.

Propson wasted no time in leaving his home and headed for Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, where the DNR has a plane equipped with a heat-imaging camera known as FLIR. Wardens and pilots have completed hours of training in how to use this camera from the skies to help find missing persons. He was joined by expert pilot Callahan, there to take command of the plane and get the duo in the air and to Ozaukee County — fast!

Jerich and Neverman also were in high gear, traveling from their homes in their warden trucks to the search command post in Ozaukee County.

The Mission Ready warden team added the DNR airplane, a warden boat and two trucks to the multi-agency search team involving the Ozaukee County Sheriff, Port Washington Fire Department, Grafton Fire Department and Mequon Fire Department. The mission? Find the kid.

By the time the wardens were on site, five hours had passed since his mother last heard from her son. That was 8 p.m. Wednesday, just as his cell phone battery was dying and after he had flipped the canoe. And to add to the urgency, the temperatures were on their way down below freezing.

“As soon as we got on site in Ozaukee County, we got more details about the GPS location of that last ping from the missing person’s cell phone,” Propson said. “That gave a start.”

Propson put his hours of training to work and manned the FLIR as pilot Callahan maneuvered the search flight route through the night sky. Jerich joined Neverman, who brought his flat-bottom boat, on land patrols while keeping in constant contact with other search teams and the DNR air team.

Jerich and Neverman drove toward the Milwaukee River with the thought an on-water search was in order. “But, it was very, very swift water,” Jerich said. “We had concerns swift water at night was not a safe situation.”

So, instead of potentially causing yet another flipped boat emergency for even more emergency workers to handle, Jerich and Neverman stayed on land and separated. Neverman took off to search all the area’s water access points in case the boy made it to shore elsewhere, and Jerich joined the ground search, staying in contact with the DNR air team above using the FLIR to detect any and all heat sources below. A human body is a heat source.

The wardens kept the land searches going until Propson and Callahan had to call it off around 3:45 a.m. Thursday.

“The camera was picking up images. But, you didn’t know immediately why it was showing hot. It could be an outdoor stove or a deer,” Propson said. “You had to differentiate what you were looking at. And that determined if we then directed the ground search teams to that spot.”

Propson said the mother of the missing person also knew he had not crossed a specific local bridge, which gave the air and land teams another landmark to plot search patterns. Then, the weather interfered with the FLIR.

“It started to snow and I couldn’t see any more,” Propson said. “So we made the decision to return to Oshkosh and come back at 6:05 Thursday morning and look with just with our eyeballs.”

Two hours later, Jerich was back on the scene to handle foot and land searches guided by directions from the DNR flight crew overhead, flying this morning in a different plane with a different strategy. Fly lower.

“The plane we had in the morning had more windows which made it easier for us to really look — and to continue to look,” Propson said. “We had to fly in very tight circles.”

Callahan said within 10 minutes of starting the search, Propson spotted an aluminum canoe aground on the west bank of the river. The canoe was located in a difficult to access stretch of the river. But, it did look like it fit the description of the missing canoe.

Propson and Callahan then directed Jerich how to drive to get to the general area, and then helped guide him on foot to the canoe through what was a difficult terrain — a flooded, mixed-forest area.

“The plane crew directed me as close as I could get with the four-wheel drive truck and said the canoe is so many hundred yards in on foot,” Jerich said.

Warden Ryan Propson texted success.But Jerich never made it to the canoe.

“In short order, I came upon the boy who was in his green tent,” Jerich said.

The teen had pitched his tent under a stand of very thick pine/juniper trees — a fact that gave Propson an aha moment. “”That explained why we couldn’t see it from the sky or with the camera,” Propson said. “The FLIR does not pick up heat through dense things like tree canopies. The tent will trap the heat inside but hold it under the pine trees.”

Propson was able to detect search personnel, animals and vehicles with the FLIR so the team knew the camera system had functioned properly.

Back on land, Jerich said he was face-to-face with one very cold kid.

“He had no dry clothes to change into after he had gone into the water,” Jerich said. “He spent the night in this tent — and it was cold.”

How cold? The Weather Channel at weather.com shows the overnight low hit 23 degrees at 1:05 a.m. in Grafton and Cedarburg. And the missing teen did not have dry clothes to change into after going into the water.

Still, Jerich said teen appeared to be OK. So Jerich gave him the phone and gentle directive to call his mother — now.

At that point, Jerich radioed his success to the air team of Propson and Callahan, who then directed the land emergency medical teams to the tent site to handle transporting the boy to a local medical facility for evaluation. Neverman, who was on his way to join the search, got the call to turn around because of the happy ending.

Jerich said while it is not a good idea to canoe in a river with such dangerous flooding conditions, the teen did make a good decision. “He stayed in his tent and waited for help.”

Up in the skies, it was a feeling of a job well-done and kudos to DNR Pilot Callahan for maneuvering a successful low pattern for Propson to spot the canoe and to guide Jerich to the boy.

“That was awesome to find him and know he was safe,” Propson said. “It was great.”

Jerich says this was multi-agency teamwork and cooperation at its finest, filled with many ready to help and to serve the public at split-second notice. The only thing that made it even better was finding the young man safe and OK in his tent. He was mighty cold, but he was safe.

And he got to call his mom.