Too Cold to Fish
It’s days like this that people call with the most amazing excuses for not being able to fish. They call very early – hoping that I have not left the house. I believe I could write a book about all the excuses I have heard. Some simply don’t show up. Some hardy souls still fish. Others are very honest and simply say they can’t take the cold weather. I like those kinds. There is something refreshing about honesty!Reminiscing about the Old Times
So, this morning I find myself in my attic. Yes, it’s cold up there, but the wind isn’t blowing, and working through piles of “stuff” in the winter is a lot better than the 120 degrees of the summer!I have a stash of old rods up there. I seem to have a hard time throwing anything away that has to do with fishing. I am reminded of the “Christmas Vacation” movie where Chevy Chase gets stuck in the attic, and spends time reminiscing about the old 16mm film he finds there. The rods there are mostly broken - missing an eye or a tip – or they just got pushed to the background when newer rods showed up. I’m guessing there are at least 50 of them over in a corner close to the single light bulb that hangs from the rafters.
This seems to happen to me once every year or so. I find the rods and I begin going through them. Every one of them has a memory attached to it. Maybe it was a special fish that I caught. Maybe it was a trip I made. Or, maybe it was a long ago gift. There is one in the bunch that my son made in a rod building class in the 70’s. It’s a cheap fiberglass blank that has zero backbone. It’s more like a buggy whip than a rod – which is why it is up in the attic and not in the boat. But hey – he built it, built it from scratch. And it is still in one piece with all the parts.
Still Good After all these Years
As I usually do, I find at least one of these artifacts that looks like it could still be useful. Heck, all it needs is a new tip. The one that broke off only took a couple of inches of rod tip with it. This one can still be used. I say this and have a discussion with myself about several more of the “good” rods.The Custom Rod Flurry
There was a time that I built custom rods. It was in the ‘70s before all the fancy, custom, rod building equipment you can buy today. A couple of spools of thread, some cork for the handles, and some of the new epoxy coating were all the tools you needed. An old barbeque grill spit motor held to the work bench by a “C” clamp served to turn the rod to allow the epoxy to cure. Otherwise, the twenty hour curing time meant that it would run and ooze.A number of custom rod building shops sprang up in the 70’s. They sold the parts and even had classes to teach you the trade. That’s where my son built his rod. They flourished for a while and then one by one they dropped out. My rod building died as well. No one was willing to pay even the cost of the materials for a good rod, let alone for my time. Back then a decent graphite casting rod with some intricate diamond wrapping cost me about $150. My building and wrapping time was about 6 hours, and if I added the meager $10 an hour labor to the rod, it was not worth the $210 to most people. By that time, places like Wal-Mart and that new catalog place – Bass Pro Shops – were selling graphite rods for much less than what the parts cost me wholesale.
Enough on rod building. I always fight an urge to try another one when I am up here.
Fishing Digression
I like to handle all of these rods. I remember some of the fish I caught with most of them. There’s one here that is broken off right at the fore grip, just above the reel seat. It was my dad’s rod that my life-long, fishing buddy, Sam Burgin used. We had the really dumb idea on one trip that we would leave the house at midnight and get the boat in the water way before dawn. We could head out and “night fish” when we thought all the bigger fish would be biting.By 2:00am we were on the water fishing out of Flamingo in Everglades National Park. Marker 5 has a light on it and we headed west in the dark to find it. We had no light – not even a flashlight, and the damp night air had everything soaked.
I anchored and we began pitching baits at the tripod marker. It was dead cut baits because we had come up with this idea late Sunday night. No tackle shops were open at 1am on a Monday morning, so we had to use the very old, frozen bait I had found in the freezer.
Right off the bat, Sam hooks up to a good sized fish. The way it ran the drag and fought, I surmised what he had hooked, and I was right. As he fought the fish, he stayed seated in the boat, I guess a little leery about losing his balance in the dark. But, for whatever reason, that rod snapped right above the reel seat.
What ensued was a circus of sorts. Sam held the rod handle along with the reel while I held the upper part of the rod and fought the fish. I hollered, “Reel!” and he reeled. I hollered, “stop!” and he stopped.
As the fish came to the side of the boat, thrashing and spraying us with saltwater, Sam was laughing a bellowing laugh. We actually managed to catch this fish!. I eased a gaff into its mouth and lifted it to the gunnel of the boat. It was a black tip shark – about 50 pounds or so.
We released the shark and continued our fishing day, and it turned out to be pretty good. As far as the early start goes, we didn’t really catch any fish to speak of until the sun came up.
Put the Rods Away
Like Chevy Chase I was reminiscing. And like that scene in the movie, my wife came home and drove into the driveway. So, once again, I put all the rods away in that cold attic. I found what I was actually looking for – an old waffle iron – and came back down the ladder.I will make more trips to the attic I am sure. I will see those rods and I will once again want to handle each and every one of them. And – I will once again spend a wonderful, cold, couple of hours remembering fishing in the past.
