dbarnett1
02-16-2011, 10:37 AM
Fishing The Pond
The day started off innocently enough. As was normal, I was up at dawn and did all of my morning chores and with nothing particular on the agenda, my dad allowed as how the rest of the day was mine.
It was a perfect late spring morning and I decided to call up a couple friends of mine and see if they would like to go fishing. About an hour later the three of us were headed to the pond light of heart and full of expectation of the great day ahead.
We spent a few minutes digging some worms from around a manure pile where we mucked out our barn. We reasoned that anything that could live in a manure pile would surely be tough enough to ride to depths threaded on a hook and entice some nice whoppers. In reality though I decided a manure pile is a form of social welfare for degenerate weaklings too lazy to make it out in the real dirt. We threaded the worms on the hooks but being soft as they were they tore off too easily to stand up to any real fishing.
After about 30 minutes of this, one of my buddies went off in search of a more suitable bait. We lived on a dairy farm so we had cattle, horses and a team of mules. As is to be expected, horse flies are in particular abundance in these settings and it didn’t take my friend long before he had caught a rather large number of the little beggars and had them imprisoned in a mason jar.
My other friend and I watched as he selected his first victim and threaded his hook through the tail section of the fly. He then executed a cast that he described as a delicate fly casting technique but in reality reminded me of our elderly neighbor lady fending off a yellow jacket with a broom. Even though his casting wasn’t going to win him any Outdoor Life covers, he did mange to get the horse fly projected about 10 feet out from the bank. It sputtered and buzzed and produced an action that I was fairly impressed with. All of a sudden a big crappie detonated on the fly and the fight was on. My buddy played the crappie out with all the finesse of a jerkline on a gravel barge. For a second it would have seemed that he had switched to a top water crankbait and that the devil himself was after it. After placing the remains of the fish on our stringer he wondered out loud what would happen if he were to place two of the flies on his hook.
The flies fit on the hook just fine possibly because the hook he was using did off season duty as an anchor for the earlier mentioned gravel barge. Still the hooks weight was minor in contrast to the weight of the flies. My other friend recommended using a split shot but was told that it would interfere with his delicate fly casting technique.
Our pond was the source of water for all of our livestock. As luck would have it, our old left hand mule, Doc was grazing on the bank of the pond and basically enjoying being left alone. Doc was a good mule in the hitch but on his own time he had the social graces of a badger with bursitis. He was just barely tolerable of most other animals and even less so of humans.
Our fishing platform was the old front porch off of our house. When dad built the house he only intended it to be a temporary fixture until he could build the final enclosed porch that he wanted. The porch had seen a few years at the pond and although it was still suitable to sit on to fish it was deteriorating and had several loose boards on it.
Continued in next post.
The day started off innocently enough. As was normal, I was up at dawn and did all of my morning chores and with nothing particular on the agenda, my dad allowed as how the rest of the day was mine.
It was a perfect late spring morning and I decided to call up a couple friends of mine and see if they would like to go fishing. About an hour later the three of us were headed to the pond light of heart and full of expectation of the great day ahead.
We spent a few minutes digging some worms from around a manure pile where we mucked out our barn. We reasoned that anything that could live in a manure pile would surely be tough enough to ride to depths threaded on a hook and entice some nice whoppers. In reality though I decided a manure pile is a form of social welfare for degenerate weaklings too lazy to make it out in the real dirt. We threaded the worms on the hooks but being soft as they were they tore off too easily to stand up to any real fishing.
After about 30 minutes of this, one of my buddies went off in search of a more suitable bait. We lived on a dairy farm so we had cattle, horses and a team of mules. As is to be expected, horse flies are in particular abundance in these settings and it didn’t take my friend long before he had caught a rather large number of the little beggars and had them imprisoned in a mason jar.
My other friend and I watched as he selected his first victim and threaded his hook through the tail section of the fly. He then executed a cast that he described as a delicate fly casting technique but in reality reminded me of our elderly neighbor lady fending off a yellow jacket with a broom. Even though his casting wasn’t going to win him any Outdoor Life covers, he did mange to get the horse fly projected about 10 feet out from the bank. It sputtered and buzzed and produced an action that I was fairly impressed with. All of a sudden a big crappie detonated on the fly and the fight was on. My buddy played the crappie out with all the finesse of a jerkline on a gravel barge. For a second it would have seemed that he had switched to a top water crankbait and that the devil himself was after it. After placing the remains of the fish on our stringer he wondered out loud what would happen if he were to place two of the flies on his hook.
The flies fit on the hook just fine possibly because the hook he was using did off season duty as an anchor for the earlier mentioned gravel barge. Still the hooks weight was minor in contrast to the weight of the flies. My other friend recommended using a split shot but was told that it would interfere with his delicate fly casting technique.
Our pond was the source of water for all of our livestock. As luck would have it, our old left hand mule, Doc was grazing on the bank of the pond and basically enjoying being left alone. Doc was a good mule in the hitch but on his own time he had the social graces of a badger with bursitis. He was just barely tolerable of most other animals and even less so of humans.
Our fishing platform was the old front porch off of our house. When dad built the house he only intended it to be a temporary fixture until he could build the final enclosed porch that he wanted. The porch had seen a few years at the pond and although it was still suitable to sit on to fish it was deteriorating and had several loose boards on it.
Continued in next post.