Fish story doesn’t improve with age

A neighbor asked me the other day if I enjoyed fishing.

I quickly replied with a forceful NO, because I don’t enjoy wetting a line and drowning a worm … then sitting. And sitting. But the question did harken me back to a boyhood experience with my dad.

The incident took place when I was a fairly new teenager and my family had gathered up all of our green-colored Coleman camping equipment, stuffed it into the camper hitched to our Jeep Waggoneer and headed off to the lake. I was especially looking forward to this excursion because my dad had promised me that I could use his old fishing pole, which was really long.

We arrived early in the evening and I started asking “Are we goin’ fishin’ yet?” every few minutes the rest of the evening. Fishing, however, was planned for the next morning when my father’s friend joined us.

After dreaming about landing the big one, a campfire breakfast took place at dawn and the three of us piled into the Jeep and headed for a secluded stream nearby. This was a shock to me since I thought we’d be fishing in the lake — a place where I had earlier been assured lived some monstrous fish.

I never wanted to swim there again, but I at least hoped to flip a pointed barb into the water to see if I could hook one of the monsters in the lip.

Instead, we stopped at this stream where, if a kid didn’t try real hard, he could barely get wet. Armed with poles and worms, my dad and buddy showed me a spot near the Jeep that might be good for me and they then started off to a place upstream.

I remember being happy with where they put me, because they’d managed to find a spot where there was a big willow tree overhanging a little pool of water — a veritable fish hangout, I thought, and perfect for a kid who likes to pull in fish by the minute regardless of size.

So I dropped my worm-kabobbed hook into the water after carefully attaching my red and white bobber and waited … about 2.57 seconds. It’s all the patience I could muster back then, so I reeled it in and tried again. This time, the bobber hardly had a chance to send ripples across the water before it was yanked under.

I just knew one of those lake monsters was living in this pool of water and I’d just hooked it. I pulled up on the pole just like I had seen bigshot fishermen do on TV and reeled in quickly.

Before long, I pulled up the biggest, meanest-looking 6-inch bullhead I’d ever seen.

Talk about terror.

I had heard all the stories about the barbs a bullhead has and there was no way I was going to be stuck. All I could think to do was scream for my dad as the fish flopped around on the bank, but he couldn’t hear me.

With tears in my eyes, I took my dad’s old pole and began whipping it back and forth from side to side — hoping the fish would just fly free. It didn’t. The line just got tangled in the willow tree with a dead and battered bullhead hanging at the end of it.

I went to the Jeep and leaned on the horn a couple of times — OK, a couple HUNDRED times — until my dad came back and rescued me and his old pole. Then we headed back to camp.

I haven’t done a whole lot of fishing since then, but I did accompany my dad on a duck hunt shortly after the bullhead episode. That’s yet another story I’ll someday tell.

For now, however, suffice it to say that my dad did more ducking than shooting. It was his own fault, though — I was 13 and there were good throwing rocks all over the place.

W. Curt Vincent can be reached at 910-506-3023 or [email protected]