Fishing for the ‘Big One’? Forget It

What I learned from the lifelong quest for knowing what the hell to do with a fishing rod in my hand

When it comes to fishing, ignorance is not bliss

No one ever taught me how to fish.

And to say, “I know what I’m doing” with a fishing rod in my hand these days would be pushing it. I’ve gotten to be moderately skilled at catching a particular kind of fish in a particular place, mainly at a particular time of year.

But to say I’m good at fishing would be like saying I’m a good football player just because I can throw a spiral. No pro league in North America is adding me to its draft list anytime soon. Maybe if I weren’t damn near 70.

Many people who know about hunting and fishing have acquired these skills because someone in their family passed them down. It’s usually from father to son or daughter, but not necessarily. It could well be grandpa with the mysterious gun cabinet and a closetful of camouflage, or an uncle with a tackle box that’s so full of tangled line and intertwined lures that it looks like the place where Bass Pro Shop threw up.

Yet somehow, that uncle always came home with three or four piscine delights dangling from a chain.

No one to teach me about fishing

In my case, I had no such person to teach me about hunting or fishing. My father was no type of sportsman, neither participant nor spectator, so he had no knowledge to pass on. For as impatient as he was whenever he tried to show me something, that may have been just as well.

And no grandfathers or uncles in my world either, as those who were still alive were living under the Soviet jackboot, far away from the lakes and rivers of Manitoba, where the fishing was and where I would have needed them to be.

But, in my father’s defence, that doesn’t mean he never took me fishing. In fact, I recall his doing so several times when I was a young teen, always along with my best friend at the time. My father would wander around the general area after dropping us off at the water’s edge, while my buddy and I fished, rarely with any success.

I have many unpleasant memories about my father throughout his life, but these occasional fishing excursions, with early-morning starts and three people who could not possibly have known less about the damned sport, are not among them. At least I have that.

What attracted me to fishing?

I’m not sure why I ever took to fishing in the first place. It may have been because the neighbour took me along with him once, and I got “hooked” (you didn’t think you’d read the whole story and not run into that pun somewhere, did you?).

In fact, he took me fishing several times over a period of a few years, before basketball and girls became a lot more interesting to me than fishing.

And I actually caught some fish on occasion when I was with him because he showed me exactly what I needed to do in those specific circumstances. He also once took me to the emergency room when I managed to implant a hook in my back with a less-than-graceful cast.

“Hooked” in more ways than one, I was. He sure was a patient man.

I loved the water and I loved the idea of fishing

Fishing or not, the idea of spending time anywhere near a body of water, especially one of Manitoba’s eye-catching rivers on the Canadian Shield side of the province, drew me in like nothing else, for some reason.

And I loved preparing all my gear ahead of any fishing excursion, even lining the individual slots in my fire-engine red tackle box with aluminum foil so that my rubber worms (which I never used successfully anyway) wouldn’t melt into the box’s plastic construction.

Ever the optimist, I was pretty sure that, if I kept my tackle in good order and read about all the different kinds of fish that called Manitoba home, I’d be bound to catch something. I was never sure why my fishing plans didn’t quite work out that way.

Fishing not on my radar for many years

I picked up my rod and reel from time to time over the years between those early days and the move to our place on the ocean here in New Brunswick over 50 years later, but never made fishing a recreational priority. Occasionally, friends would take me out, but those friends a) always knew what they were doing, and b) each owned a boat.

Changed the whole dynamic of the fishing experience in those specific instances. But such opportunities were few and far between.

During our 40 years in Alberta, we never lived anywhere near water, and it seemed I was always busy with other things, such as raising my daughter, running my business, and participating in all manner of community life. And I continued to know next to nothing about fishing, so the sport didn’t call out to me. In fact, it rarely crossed my mind.

Fishing and COVID – a perfect match when we moved to New Brunswick

Then, about 13 years ago, we decided to move here to New Brunswick, eventually buying a place that overlooks the ocean. And that’s only part of our water story.

In addition to being next to the Northumberland Strait, we are surrounded by rivers here — some small and picturesque, others huge and majestic. It was like this whole part of the province was conspiring to entice me to take up fishing once again.

Then, COVID hit eight months after we moved here, and we were all looking for things to do that didn’t require interaction with others. Fishing seemed to fit that bill rather well (so did boating, but we were wrong — very wrong — about that). There was only one small problem: I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing with fishing rod in hand.

Fishing definitely not a household food source...

Didn’t stop me, though. I bought some shiny new tackle — where exactly I would use it and what type of fish I’d try to catch with it didn’t enter into the equation.

I also bought a tackle box the size of a Volkswagen because I needed somewhere to keep all those fishing lures and other fancy accessories I was buying that would undoubtedly turn me into a fisherman.

And, like I did when I was still pimply and naïve all those years ago, I read copiously about how to fish here in New Brunswick. Always with the books — great way to learn enough to draw you into fishing, but not enough to make you good at it. Only experience could do that.

Regardless, I was going to be ready, I assured myself. All I needed was to tell the fish I was there, and they would surely swim right up and eagerly throw themselves at whatever wiggly temptation I was dangling in the water. No sweat.

It’s a good thing my wife wasn’t depending on my fishing skills to keep the two of us fed.

Good thing I kept a fishing logbook

I kept a log of every time I went fishing. For every excursion, I recorded information about the weather, tides, water temperature, and other details about the day and location. In 2020, it turns out I went fishing 23 times to different places with absolutely nothing to show for it. My logbook is rife with phrases like, “enjoying the outdoors, but actual fishing is a lost cause,” and “I am hopeless at this.”

It eventually starts including some other choice words, too.

I was prepared to give up, and did, for a short time. Whether in Manitoba, Alberta, or New Brunswick, I realized I still knew nothing about fishing, and I wasn’t going to learn what I needed to know from books.

Nor was I going to learn strictly by trial and error without at least a base of knowledge about what type of fish I wanted to catch, what seasons were best for that particular type of fish, and what a person should use to try catching them.

Actually, I didn’t even know that those were the questions I needed to ask about fishing. As they say, your greatest problems arise with “what you don’t know that you don’t know.” With no one to explain it all (remember that we’d just moved here and COVID was raging), I was left with two options: quit the sport outright or figure out what to do and whom to ask questions.

Somewhere along the way, I decided the latter would be the better decision. After all, my wife, Michele, had just lovingly made me a quilt with fishing things all over it, so how could I turn my back on that?

Finally...

The 24th time I went fishing that year, in September, I finally caught something — a striped bass from the Northumberland shore behind our place. By that time, I’d asked other people fishing along the shore and the proprietors at my tackle and bait shop all sorts of questions, apparently even some of the right ones. And YouTube was at my disposal, too.

I pulled out all the stops in terms of gathering information. Then, somewhere along the way, it finally clicked that, when you go fishing, you go with the intention of catching a specific type of fish. And you plan everything else around that.

On a macro level, this includes location, bait type, and seasonal migration patterns. On a micro level, this includes water temperature, wind direction, and (as I learned much later) the “solunar fish forecast,” which is a composite of what the tides, the sun, and the moon are doing at any given time. Scary good, that app.

Who knew? And what was I going to do with all that stuff in my tackle box that had nothing to do with fishing for striped bass? (Answer: transfer all the striped bass gear into a smaller tackle box.)

Fishing and actually catching

By October 2020, after catching a few more, I entered into my log, “I can really do this.” And I’ve learned something new about fishing for striped bass every year since then. I’m now at the point where I can go out, get skunked, and not think that I’m therefore a lost cause as a fisherman.

Now, on a day when I have no fish to bring home, I can write in my logbook that I’m “enjoying the outdoors,” without any bad words or dark thoughts in the rest of the entry, as there were oh so many times in 2020.

Haven’t yet learned enough about fishing to catch trout around here, though — different process altogether. Maybe next spring.

Ask me then what my logbook says.