Paris Goodnight: Snagging one while fishing for frisbee
Published 12:00 am Sunday, October 16, 2022
Have you ever gone fishing for frisbee? Those aren’t the little fish caught from streams up in the Great White North — we called those brookies when I had the chance to go after them back in my younger, wilder days.
No, this fishing escapade was for something you might have also tried if you’ve got dogs who like to chase toys or other flying discs that might get snagged in a tree or some other unintended spot. If such an item gets stuck where you can’t easily reach it, other methods of retrieval come into play. If you can’t climb up to get it, sometimes your options are limited. So fishing for frisbee was actually my Plan C after the first two attempts failed miserably to bring down a toy that got tossed up on the second story roof of my house by the friend of one of the Goodnight kids.
That height has always been beyond the range I’m comfortable with and my knees start quaking a little bit with each rung of a ladder even going up toward the first floor roof level, so I’m not likely to try borrowing a longer one to get up there anyway.
Plan A was trying to use a stick out of a second story window near where the toy was stuck, but that didn’t work. And Plan B was to use the jet stream function of the hose from ground level to wash it down. That also proved futile, as did the winds and rain of Tropical Storm Ian that I thought would surely bring down something as light as that flying disc — but no luck.
That led to the third option of breaking out the fishing rod and attaching the lone hook that I could find in my supplies to the line and starting to toss. Since I don’t get a chance to fish for much else these days, I wasn’t too upset to find that my once plentiful supply of lures and rods had slowly disappeared over the years. The one fishing rod remaining in the garage was not the kind I was well practiced with either. It was smaller and lighter than most I’ve used over the years, so it didn’t exactly produce precision casts from the beginning. I took a few extra practice casts along the driveway just to get the feel of it, as I’ve watched a neighbor do with a fly rod through the years as he honed his skills before heading out to trout waters.
From ground level, I couldn’t actually see where my hook was landing as I started casting. So I did what anyone in this situation would and climbed up the ladder to get closer to my target.
I still couldn’t see exactly where my target was — and let me stop here to note that AP style remains capitalizing that trademarked Frisbee name when talking about one of the original company’s products. This wasn’t one of those, and since frisbee spelled lowercase looks more like a little fish species of the creeks of North Carolina, I’m going to stick with that spelling for the remainder of this tale about the elusive flying disc that remained stuck up high for weeks.
At one point, it felt like I had hooked it. But that proved to be one of the roof fasteners that after a little more tugging freed the hook and let it plop back down beside me. It was the same feeling I’ve had many times over the years when at the first moment you think it’s a big one, only to be disappointed to realize it’s just a log under the water or something else not easy to pull to the surface.
After much trial and error with those practice casts getting a little closer to where I wanted them to land, I actually hooked the frisbee and managed to pull it right to the edge of the gutter, where the hook released again. But you better believe that feeling of the hook setting was just as exhilarating as the nicest largemouth bass I’ve ever snagged.
I know exactly how our Outdoors columnist felt when he finally got his boat in the water and found success at a place he had mapped out earlier. You can read Dan Kibler’s fishing tale on Page 5C in today’s Post.
Like the final stage of getting a net to make sure the fish was safely landed, I just had to get the original Plan A stick that was still up on the roof where I had left it to tap the little frisbee over the gutter’s edge and down to where I could grab it.
The project proved once again that trial and error, with just the right amount of perseverance, pay off with success in this world. I just wish I would’ve chosen a more profitable endeavor to invest my time and effort in. But hey, I’ll take the frisbee being off the roof as a good enough reward for now.
Wonder what the neighbors must have thought if they saw me up on a ladder with a fishing rod.
Paris Goodnight is editor of the Salisbury Post.
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