by Rock Dawson (originally published in Tail #18)
I was backing out of my driveway and onto the street in front of my house a few days ago and as I straightened out my truck to drive away I saw a familiar bike coming around the corner up ahead. It was my 13 year old son and he was pedaling hard. His buddy, about 30 yards behind him, was trying to keep up. As they got closer I could tell that my son had a tree branch in his hand and was smiling from ear to ear. His smile was that great big pure smile that exudes excitement, joy and just pure happiness in the moment. The kind of smile I remember having as a kid when I started going fishing on my own and catching fish.
“Mom told me we couldn’t take the
fly rod out of the house.”
I now examined the stick a bit closer
and could see that there was
twine wrapped around the stick,
a makeshift mono leader
tied to the twine and a fly tied on the end!
Now I started smiling.
My son, as it turns out, had earlier been forbidden by his mom to leave the house with his fly rod. My wife wasn’t sure where he and his friend were going and, just like any of us going fishing, planned fishing spots can quickly change if you don’t find any fish. My son and his friend had taken her decision in stride and left about five minutes later to “go ride their bikes.” Now my son was standing in front of me with his small digital camera, a stick, a huge grin and pictures of him and his buddy holding fish.
“Did your mom know you were going fishing?” I asked?
“No sir,” he responded with his grin getting larger, “Mom told me we couldn’t take the fly rod out of the house.” I now examined the stick a bit closer and could see that there was twine wrapped around the stick, a makeshift mono leader tied to the twine and a fly tied on the end! Now I started smiling, and my smile quickly turned to a laugh that my son and I shared for the next several minutes. He had successfully accomplished the task of doing exactly what he had set out to do, go fishing, and he’d done so without, at least by the letter of the law, disobeying his mom.
Come to find out, he heard what his mom had told him, replied “yes ma’am,” grabbed some twine, some mono, and three flies shoved them in his pocket and took off. When he and his friend got to their “secret hole,” he found an acceptable branch and they were fishin’! We looked at his pictures and smiled for a few more minutes before I told him that he’d better not let his mom see his makeshift rig.
As he and his buddy pedaled back to our house and I climbed back into my truck my mind was flooded with memories of growing up on the Texas Gulf Coast. My buddies and I mainly targeted redfish, and our secret spot was usually somewhere we weren’t supposed to be. We mainly roamed the back bays of Galveston, Matagorda, and Lavaca. We didn’t have a technical poling skiff, we didn’t have high-dollar fly rods or reels, we didn’t have any technical fishing clothing, we didn’t have cell phones to tell our parents we were ok (and once my mom did call the Coast Guard and the Matagorda sheriff looking for us), but we did have a desire to go fishing, limitations be damned!
Our rig consisted of a 16-foot aluminum jon boat that my brother and I mowed lawns all summer to buy, a trailer, and a 1950-something dinosaur of a Johnson motor we had bought from a neighbor by mowing his lawn. We had a smattering of fiberglass rods, none of which I really remember – except for my bright yellow and blue Eagle Claw, which was the only “real” fly rod any of us had at the time – and a couple of Pflueger Medalist fly reels, a tackle box full of whatever we could get our hands on, and an unbridled determination to find fish. I guarantee you that that boat and that gear have more hours of fishing than anything else I have ever owned or will ever own, and we caught a lot of fish (probably not as many as I remember but a lot nonetheless). At the time, we could go places that no one else could (or was willing to) go to, and we found redfish on back flats and in the salt marsh that even today’s poling skiffs couldn’t reach. We knew that redfish could get to places where people couldn’t so we were going to be the ones who could! And the glory of it all? Coming back to the dock in our makeshift rig with our makeshift gear and hearing a guy in a nice decked-out boat say “Tough day today, how’d you guys do?” I know that our smiles were just as big as my son’s and his buddy’s.
So as you look through all the gear that’s out there today and get depressed about the cost of this or the cost of that and are thinking to yourself that you can’t afford to go fly-fishing, stop! Some of the greatest adventures that you ever have will be when you just “Grab your *&^% and GO!”
