Fishing with my Fathers
Posted on September 30, 2013 by bob in OffTheBeatenPath
The trip was planned for weeks; with three schedules to coordinate you book as far in advance as possible to improve the odds of it going through. We’d organized the outing around the last spawn of the year, just as the full moon was about to peak. Each of us – my father, my father-in-law and I – hoped for full stringers of big slab bream. The bass were carefully watching the moon schedule as well and planned calculated shallow-water ambushes, and so the chance of laying into a few green trout was better than average.
Our weapons of choice were as simple as the fish we pursued; fly rods and telescoping cane poles with more of each than we had hands to hold them. I’d bought the feed store out of crickets, and the extra rods would prove invaluable if the bite really turned on. As we rode down the highway, Donnie, my father-in-law, regaled us with tales of thousand-bream days fishing the black backwaters of the St. Johns in Florida, stories which sped our imaginations and my truck a bit faster down the road.
Easing the boat off the trailer, I positioned Dad on the stern platform for more latitude to execute his preferred bream bed tactic, swinging the long rod. As we piled into the aluminum jon, Donnie on the center seat and me on the bow, Dad hooked into a fish before we’d gotten settled. Donnie and I quickly unwound the line, cork and hook from our bream busters and each lobbed a fat cricket under the hickory limbs that sheltered sandy beds in the water beneath. It wasn’t long before we all had a bream on a hook, but these “bait bream” were not the behemoths we’d daydreamed of all week.
Hunting the honey hole, I eased the boat down the bank, trolling motor on low, pausing every 10 yards to pitch a cricket to a stump or laydown. Dad was laying into them consistently, the elegance with which he propelled the white stone fly at the end of his tippet more worthy of a Colorado trout stream or Bahamian bonefish flat than a pond in Pike County.
Despite our luck with smaller bream and bass, the honey hole eluded us. The fall air was cooler, yet the water was still warm, so we backed off the beds to fish cover in deep water near the dam and started catching a few more. The bull bream of our dreams, however, were nowhere to be seen.
With the sun dropping low over the trees and the moon slowly rising in the east, we hunkered down near the large overflow pipe in the dam, having had success there earlier in the afternoon on smaller bream and green trout. With precision, Donnie pitched a cricket alongside the pipe, allowing it to drop just inside the shadow. In a second, his orange bobber disappeared beneath the green water and he reared back, the rod bowing under the weight of a hefty coppernose bream.
Within minutes, we had boated half a dozen pan-sized panfish and our cricket numbers had dwindled. Between fish, I paused and watched Donnie chuck cricket after cricket right next to the pipe and pull bull bream after bull bream into the boat. In my mind, I could see him, my age, sitting in an old jon boat like the one we were in, filling a cooler with big, black-water bream from the St. John’s. Whether or not he or Dad realized it, they both had ear-to-ear smiles as they hooked into big green trout or thick-shouldered bull bream.
For a few minutes, the three of us – silhouetted against the rising moon and the setting sun – were children again, deriving sheer joy from sitting atop a bream bed on the full moon, like many generations before had done, and hopefully many generations forward will enjoy.
Niko Corley spends his free time hunting, fishing, boating and enjoying the outdoors. He can be contacted at cootfootoutfitters@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@cootfootoutfitters.
