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Author's
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Pocket WaterReviewsReview to come! |
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Excerpted from
Pocket Water: If
I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, it would have been a
a Johnson Spoon with a strip of pork rind impaled on the hook. More
likely, it would've been a Silver Doctor.
My father, who is still well-remembered
as the Tap of "Tap's Tips," the column that ran monthly in Field
& Stream for thirty-five years, was editing Hunting and Fishing
magazine in 1940, the year I was born.
He fished and hunted virtually every weekend of the year -- and
a good number of week nights after he got home from the office, too --
often with the era's best-known anglers, men like Lee Wulff and Ed Zern
and John Alden Knight, whose articles he edited.
Dad had racks of bamboo fly rods, drawers full of reels, boxes
of flies, cartons of fly-tying materials, shelves of fishing books.
Fishing was both his job and his passion. I
was born into it, you might say. From the time I was old enough to hold
a rod, Dad took me with him, and as he remembers it, I caught landlocked
salmon and smallmouth bass by trolling All
this could easily have turned me off from fishing, and truthfully, I don't
believe that those early encounters with exalted species of gamefish were
what hooked me. When
I was five, my family moved to a quiet farming community west of Boston. A two-minute walk over the hill behind
our house took me to The Old Res.
It was a shallow, weedy, ten-acre pond that was fed by a trickle
that dried up in the summer. A
falling-down brick gatehouse at the deep end testified to the pond's origin
as a reserve town water supply.
The Old Res teemed with warmwater life -- bullfrogs, dragon flies,
ducks, herons, muskrats, leeches, turtles, snakes, and, of course, fish. The
Old Res was responsible for my enduring passion for fishing. It held no landlocked salmon or smallmouth
bass. But horned pout and
sunfish and yellow perch and crappies abounded, along with the rare --
and therefore prized -- eel and pickerel.
There were rumors that largemouths (which seemed possible) and
brook trout (dubious, but who knew?) hung around secret springholes out
in the middle, but I never caught one, and given the fact that I squandered
most of my childhood on the muddy banks of The Old Res, I'm quite certain
that had other species lived there, one of them would have eaten my worm
at one time or another. Still,
the possibility of it made me shiver every time my One
spring evening soon after we moved to the banks of The This
struck me as odd, since I already had my own bamboo fly rod plus access
to Dad's arsenal of gear, but I followed him into the woods out back.
After a lot of testing and rejecting, we cut down a poplar sapling, took
it home, stripped the bark off it, and rigged it with some bait-casting
line and a couple feet of leader. I
used that pole a few times to derrick stunted panfish out of The Old Res,
but it wasn't very effective. I
couldn't get my bait out far enough with it, and I couldn't strip in a
fish when I hooked it. After
a bamboo fly rod, my pole felt heavy and stiff and unresponsive. So pretty soon I went back to using my
fly rod. I remember feeling
vaguely guilty about it. For
some reason, Dad had wanted me to use that home-made poplar pole. At
the time I was too young to understand, and he never did explain why he
insisted I fish with a poplar sapling. It's
taken me a lifetime to understand it fully: He didn't want me to skip any steps, and given his expertise
and the place First
principles. Begin at the
beginning. Learn by doing.
Try and err and try again. The
hard way is the best way. That's
what Dad wanted for me.
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