FISH BAIT IS A FOOL'S GAME
Rex Burress
The first step for a fisherman to catch a fish is to have the proper bait. The entire endeavor is to fool the fish into grabbing your hook disguised with a food enticement or deceitful imitation.
Go into a tackle shop, and you will see a wall-full of plastic and steel plugs and artificial flies, meant to either fool the fish or lure the fisherman to buy them. Bottled red fish eggs are right up there, and plastic beads that look like eggs, too, and live worms and minnows for the natural urge. I'm not sure what my daughter used on her fishing trip to Shelter Cove, but when I took a party boat beyond Golden Gate Bridge, it was smelt.
The paper's weekly fishing report bait recommendations reads like a foreign power's secret code: “Gold Lake--inflated night crawlers and power bait. Lake Oroville--dart-headed worms; Lake Almanor--”Gulps!”, Pit River--dark nymphs, Shasta Lake--Spooked Robo Worms, Thermalito--whopper ploppers!
Colorful lures actually make good collectors items, especially old antique wooden plugs that sell for big bucks. I have a bunch in equally old tackle boxes—the hard kind of box with folding drawers full of old reels and things. Above my studio easel, I have a Styrofoam ball festooned with lures. I found a bucketful on the Emeryville tidal flats after a storm had destroyed some sportsmen shacks-on-stilts in the mud! Salvage on the beaches is free.
Aside from artificial black rubber worms that also fools fish, the plump 'fishin' worms from the manure pile back of the barn was our key in catching bullheads and perch in No Creek back in Missouri. The worm, so easily threaded on the hook, is a grimy ordeal for parents at “Kids Hooked On Fishing—Not Drugs” June event in Oroville,CA. The lowly worm is a universal favorite that does catch fish.
The process was simple for a bare-foot boy with overalls and a straw hat—fill a Prince Albert tobacco can with worms, slip the slim can into a hip pocket, along with a ball of white twine and hooks, and walk down the lane a mile to the creek. Retrieve a cut willow pole, add a cork float, and swing the package out into the Deep Hole...and wait for the bite. At ten years old, I could do that walk by myself. That's independence.
In still fishing it's the waiting that is tolerated. But there are the birds to watch, perhaps an impatient coon might have left its nocturnal hideaway and be prodding the shoreline, a snapping turtle might crawl out of the creek to dig a hole to lay eggs, and a fox might pop out of the buckbrush. Any number of unexpected wonders might occur. Fishing for catfish in No Creek taught patience and nature.
When Dad moved into Trenton, he discovered nightcrawlers on the lawn at night, and a new phase of bait developed. He had an old refrigerator in the garage filled with nightcrawlers—big worms...if you can catch them in the dark!
Old Earl VanDeventer, fishing at the reservoir didn't need a worm to catch a 23-pound carp! He rigged a leader onto an artificial fly at the end of a floating plug, and the cruising carp sucked it in. He called me for help, and I scooped it out! Actually, I missed with the scoop and ended up in the water with an armful of fish!
Photographer Gerald Wright made a stinking cheese bait he sold that was popular for channel cats. In fact, the catfish anglers seemed to vie for making the stinkiest concoction they could muster. The barbed cats rooted their way through muddy waters, gobbling whatever stinky thing they could detect!
There were carp fishermen in that neck-o-the-woods too, and the common bait was dough bait. Every fisherman had his secret recipe, and my flour-raw egg-vanilla extract-and anise oil dough ball formula was effective for the sucker-mouthed fishy brutes.
Not so secret was a bait in Diamond Lake near Crater Park. One boat was catching trout and a dozen others on the lake not. The shared cry went up, “VELVETTA,” velvetta, from boat to boat all over the lake!
The most tragic fishing lure episode I've seen happened on a nature walk I was leading from Oakland Camp to the Cascades. I saw something unusual hanging from an Incense Cedar along Spanish Creek, and discovered a flying squirrel that had become impaled on a lost lure and was dangling there dead like a hanging corpse! The hikers were stricken with grief, and we went to great effort to take it down, and carry it tenderly in a hanky lined 'coffin' back to camp for an elaborate burial ceremony!
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” --Henry David Thoreau