Wielding a fishing rod in a photogenic way your correspondent has never managed. Photo: Mitch Teich
Apr 23, 2022 —
We’re closing in on the end of the triumvirate of school vacations here. Our son’s February break, our daughter’s college spring break, our son’s spring break – they come one after another, and because this is the North Country, it snows during each of them, just to remind us that there are places where other people go during spring break.
Of course, you can’t really get away for three consecutive school vacations, so this past week has been a pretty modest spring break for an eighth grader, unless you count cleaning up the branches from our yard, emptying the dishwasher, and finishing 37 Formula One races on the Xbox.
But he and I did get away for some fishing. I love fishing, or at least I love fishing with my son. He tends to catch fish, whereas I make supportive comments and take pictures of him with his haul. My own fishing career has advanced only slightly from my childhood, and the time I was five years old and convinced my parents to let me go out on a dock, with a fishing rod we had acquired from heaven knows where, and I caught what may well have been a sardine that had fallen off a boater’s pizza.
I pretty much retired from fishing after that triumph until we moved up here and Charlie – er, got hooked. (You try writing that sentence without that lame pun.) He’s taken a truly scientific approach to fishing, reading books and magazines and websites, trolling the fishing sections (ha ha!) of stores, and asking the right people questions. This means asking people with fishing experience about the right types of lures and techniques, and asking me whether I’ll drive him to the river.
I really do enjoy spending the time with him, even though I’m still catching on (seriously, another fishing pun?) to the lexicon. We’ll be on the pier or the riverbank or a friend’s boat, and Charlie will declare, “I wonder if I should use the top-water or the chatterbait?” And he’ll puzzle over that for a while, running through the pros and cons of each, based on whether he’s after smallmouth bass or pike or tarpon; while I’m busy looking for the scissors to cut my fishing line after I have again caught a submerged rock ledge. By the time that’s accomplished, he has settled on a senko bait, because “they catch everything.”
The great thing is that there are a million places to throw a line in the water in the North Country, and so there’s a fishing trip for every occasion – after baseball practice, on a Sunday morning, when you’re 13 and you’re trying to avoid emptying the dishwasher – without needing a lot of planning.
Our first trip of the year actually did involve a little planning – Charlie wanted to go after trout with his fly-fishing gear, and so we found a nice spot that was completely undiscovered on this Friday morning – undiscovered by both other people and also by fish. But there will be many more trips to come this season, I expect.
In fact, Charlie just came in from the other room right now, where he was getting ready to respool my reel, which had been depleted from having caught so many logs and rocks. “Do you want six-pound or ten-pound line?” he asked. I suggested ten pounds of fishing line sounded kind of heavy, but he just rolled his eyes and went about getting the line on my reel. And I’m grateful, because you never know when a ten-pound sardine will strike.
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