Incidental Catch


I can still remember that boyhood vacation some fifty years ago when a bunch of us gathered around the dock. We were having a picnic in a little meadow near Modesto in California, and my grandfather was letting us try and catch a few crawdads. (There was a muddy little pond nearby, and he couldn’t miss any opportunity for a little fishing.) We tied a small piece of bacon on a short string and were letting it sink to the bottom.

The theory was simple enough. We’d wait for a crawdad to pull on the line, and then we’d haul him up to the dock. The little crustaceans were so greedy that they’d keep hanging on even as they felt themselves being hauled into the air onto a dock full of kids with dinner on their minds. Unfortunately, none of the little critters seemed to be in the neighborhood. The bottom of the pond wasn’t producing any action.

Bluegill Challenge
We would have soon lost interest and gone out to terrorize butterflies or other helpless bugs if it hadn’t been for the arrival of another aquatic species. While the crawdads were nowhere to be found, a big school of hungry bluegill swam under the dock and started pulling at our offering when we hauled it toward the surface. Now this was fun! They were smacking the little chunk of meat and trying to pull it from the string.

On our end we were doing our best to haul them in. The problem, naturally, was that without a hook, they’d let go of the bait as soon as they got pulled above water. What made the whole thing fun was that both sides kept trying; the fish tried to haul the bait down, we tried to haul the fish up. We had lots of action and spent the better part of an hour in a standoff. Finally, we got smart and slid an oar into the lake just below the school of fish. When the fish got near the surface holding onto the bacon, we’d bring up the paddle quick and actually managed to flip a couple of fat sunfish up on the dock! Grandma helped us clean them, and we grilled them for dessert.

One of the real joys of fishing is that you never know what will rise to your bait. Over the years a good many of my fishing trips have been enhanced by the arrival of fish species that were very different from what we were chasing. I’ve had a ball catching salmon on rock fishing trips, whitefish on trout outings, sharks on striped bass adventures, and crappie when I was trying for bass.

Ugly Fish
Sometimes you have to change tactics fast! When I was a teen-ager, we had a tide pool near our beach cabin that was always full of surfperch. There were several species in residence, but all were feisty and provided lots of quick action. During one trip, however, we had nothing much happening. We tried for an hour to get any sort of bite but nothing worked. Finally, I hooked what felt like a big mat of kelp. It was really heavy, and when it finally reached the surface, I nearly dropped my rod! This huge, ugly brown fish was hanging from the end of my line!

I gawked in amazement as a big wave came in. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, and the ebbing tide snapped off my light leader, and the fish sank out of sight! Tactics had to change! I put on my heaviest leader and my biggest hook, and loaded the offering with a whole squid! A few casts later, the big fish chomped onto my offering. This time I had a plan. When it got to the surface, I hauled it into a small inlet, and as the water receded, it was left flopping on the sand. My brother, with great protest, jumped on top of it and threw it up on the rocks! Instead of a one-pound perch, we had landed a 10-pound lingcod!

Last week our sturgeon trip was saved due to a change in tactics when some “incidental catch” became available. The big sturgies were off the bite, but something was smacking our anchovies. After a bunch of missed bites, we cut the bait into chunks and put on some smaller hooks. Down went the rod tip. My buddy Jim set the hook and felt something struggling on the line. A couple of minutes later and a nice two-pound flounder was flopping in the fish box. A couple of hours of concentrated action and we had a dozen tasty fish to fillet for dinner. If we hadn’t been flexible, we would have ended up with a lot less action and fish sticks as our entree!

Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and rvlife.com.