BARRY ST. CLAIR: Graduations

By Barry St. Clair

Tue, May 13 2008

— We started out by putting him in a baby bed in the bottom of the boat when my wife and I went fishing. The noise and motion would rock him to sleep most of the time. Despite the extra effort required to keep him save and happy, we usually caught fish.
As he grew larger, my son developed a fascination for the plastic worms and lizards in my tackle box. While his mother and I fished, he would sit quietly on the boat floor and play with the hook-less lures for long periods of time. He is going to be a natural, I told myself.
He caught his first fish, a bluegill, from a small pond on the farm we used to own. Digging the foot-long earthworms from the rich black mud was almost as fun as using them to catch a 5-gallon bucket full of hand-sized bluegills. A lot of warm Sunday afternoons was happily spent that way. Under the shade of a giant willow tree, we would watch the brightly colored bobber dance and then dunk when a bluegill inhaled the piece of worm we used as bait.
Gradually, he learned how to cast and retrieve using a spin-cast rod and reel. We fished for white bass on area lakes whenever we could. It was exciting stuff to have a half-acre of voracious fish slashing a panicked school of shad on the water’s surface. Cast a small silver spoon to them and an instant hook-up was the result. Some of the larger fish were almost too strong for him to reel to the boat. We relished those experiences and have a wall full of photographs commemorating those happy trips.
As he grew older and stronger, we branched out. Crappie fishing became a favorite in a newly created lake not far from our house. We fed them a lot of minnows before he got the hang of how to detect a strike. Crappies are notorious for inhaling a minnow and swimming upward with it. Instead of the tell tail tug, tug, tug, the line goes slack. Eventually, he learned how to lift up on the rod and beat them at their own game.
We got into largemouth bass fishing. Like me, he preferred to cast top-water lures. Most of our bass fishing was on farm ponds. It takes a lot less time to locate willing fish in these small environments. They would savagely attack just about any floating lure. These were good places for a beginner to learn how to bass fish.
Bass won’t always hit a floating lure, so he learned how to Texas rig a plastic worm. It took a lot of missed strikes before he caught his first bass on a worm rig. Plastic worm fishing requires learning how to feel instead of see what is happening to the lure. All bass fishermen go through the same procedure learning how to fish them. He caught larger bass using the plastic worms. That is one reason they have become such a popular and productive lure since they were invented over 50 years ago. In just a few short years he went from playing with worms to using them to catch bass — an amazing transition. My son was becoming a fisherman.
We moved on to striper fishing and he learned how to pilot a boat, read a depth finder and throw a cast net to catch bait. One of our best trips was a windy day in early spring when he was 14 years old. We located a school of suspended stripers and could not keep the hooks baited fast enough for the ravenous school hovering below the boat. He did everything right that day, and my best memory of the adventure is how fast he could move from one side of the boat to the other trying to keep up with the rods as they bowed to the water’s surface. We caught a lot of 5- to 7-pound stripers and released most of them. He learned how much fun catch and release fishing can be, and how valuable a tool it is to protect fisheries from over-harvest. And then another transition took place.
Almost overnight is seemed, he discovered music, cars and girls. Fishing with Dad was no longer a priority. We both graduated to a different level of existence. That is just the way of things, I comforted myself. I hoped along the way he learned more than just how to catch fish. Becoming a sportsman includes a lot of character building. Patience, courtesy and doing the right thing even when no one is looking, are values that also apply to daily life in the real world. I am confident he mastered those ethical challenges and will pass them on.
Very soon his theme song will be Pomp and Circumstance instead of the fishing songs we sang together and laughed about during our many shared adventures. When he walks across the stage and receives his college diploma commemorating years of a job well done, I’ll be there. And so will the memories. If you see a tear in my eye, it won’t be one of sadness, but of accomplishment. He will be graduating from childhood to adulthood all in a formal moment.
And he may not recognize it, or even think it is important at this stage in his life, but my son will also be graduating from a boy fishing to a fisherman, and that makes me proud.