Teach a Man to Fish. Seriously. Do It.

I’m not a fisherman.  Before this past summer, the last time I had been fishing I think I was five.  I caught a sunfish and an eel and I think I remember thinking it was cool.  For whatever reason, though, fishing never became part of my life.

I mentioned in a post long, long ago that one of my goals for that year was to “catch and eat a fish”.  That never happened.  It’s not like I didn’t have the time, cash, or opportunity – I had a full year to pull that off, after all.  I didn’t have the interest or motivation… but mainly I didn’t have the wisdom, and I didn’t know where to get it.
 
Fishing is more than baiting a hook, waiting, and yanking up a catch.  It’s about where and when to go.  It’s about casting and knot tying and knowing what each of the parts of a modern reel do and untangling tangled lines.  It’s about identifying what you just caught, how to not slice your hands to ribbons on its spines while removing it from a hook, and how to deal with it afterwards.  Throw it back?  Put it in a bucket, on a stringer, on ice, or what?  And, assuming this thing is edible, I cut this up how, exactly?

Yep, all these things, individually, are two-minute YouTube searches.  I mean, it’s “the future”, after all, so what isn’t?  But, without the tactile stuff and years of exposure, it’s just knowledge, not wisdom.  You may as well be trying to learn to rebuild a car engine without ever actually having held a socket wrench before.   So that resolution, like most, faded in importance and this gap in my “man-knowledge” (or whatever you want to call it) remained unfilled.

As the years relentlessly scream by I try to cram as much information as I can into my son’s head.  How to ride a bike, sure, but also how to pump up (or change) its tires, adjust the brakes, and grease the chain.  How to use a hammer, a screwdriver, a wrench, a saw, and a sanding block.  How to throw and catch baseballs and footballs and Frisbees, how to hold a tennis racket and how to dribble a basketball on the run.   How to read, how to bake bread, how to hold a guitar, how to find North on a cloudy day, how to play Ode to Joy and Still Alive on the piano, how redstone works in Minecraft, and why it’s so important to own the middle of a chessboard.

And about ten thousand other things.

But not how to fish.

Claiming that the 10,000 plus things should count for something instantly turns a giant paragraph of humblebrag into the weakest strawman in the universe the moment your kid asks “Dad, will you take me fishing?”  Saying “I’m real busy right now, maybe later” is obviously completely unacceptable, unless you enjoy hearing Harry Chapin play on continuous loop in your head.  And it’s not like we live in a desert or in a middle of a large city or anything– we are literally (well… littoral-y, I guess) surrounded by water. Saying “Dude, I have no idea how to do that,” is in direct violation of the Parents’ 1st Commandment “Thou shalt always, always fake the funk”.

There was no more “later”.  I told him “Sure!  I’ll find out where some good spots are and I’ll let you know.”
 
Panicked, I talked with a guy I knew at a church barbeque and asked him about the yearly Kiwanis fishing clinic I knew was coming up soon.  I asked how I could sign the boy up. He gave me the info and I agreed to come help at the pre-event preparations.

See, I figured I could find something that involved heavy lifting or moving chairs or whatever to “pay” for the boy’s admission into the event.  When the wife and I arrived, though, we were pointed to some disassembled fishing rods and were cheerfully told to “set them up”.  No other instructions were given – after all, everyone knows how to “set up” a fishing rod.  What could be simpler?

The forty or so other folks that were there were chatting away, busy with their tasks. We looked at each other and took a seat next to some folks who looked friendly and we attempted to copy what they were doing.  After about five minutes of doing our best “monkey dealing with a Rubik’s Cube” impressions the wife asked the man next to her what we needed to do. 

He (super friendly dude, btw) rapidly walked her though the explanation that (at the time) I was pretty sure included terms that he was making up as he went.  I listened as carefully as I could but it still sounded like he was reciting some weird mashup of Huck Finn and Jabberwocky to me.  We mimicked the motions well enough but when it came time for knot tying we again asked for assistance.   Short story, here: the knots were tested by the guy at the end of the assembly line.  The wife’s knots all held; most of mine failed and needed to be redone.

After an hour or so we thanked everyone and took off, a little smarter than when we had arrived.

At the event there were all sorts of displays and tables with different types of fish and kids were running everywhere.  It was all very well done and all very educational.  After a while we were allowed on the pier with all the other folks and given a rod and a small amount of bait.  Putting the crab chunks on the hook was no problem.  Lowering the hook into the water and waiting was also no problem.

After a bit, some of the kids around were pulling up fish.  Others were coming up to me asking me questions about stuff - I was wearing a “volunteer” shirt and was over the age of 12, after all.  Most of the time I just helped them find someone else that could help them (you may commence the ticker-tape parade for me at your leisure).

Meanwhile, the boy was catching nothing.  He got some nibbles and more than once the bait was gone but that’s it.  After about 90 minutes, about two-thirds of the kids there caught something.  He didn’t.  I prepped him for that possibility but he was understandably disappointed when we left for the day.

I told a highly abridged version of this story to a co-worker a month or so later (I’m not sure why fishing came up – I guess it doesn’t matter) and he invited us to his place to fish off of the pier in his neighborhood.  I said sure.

A couple of weeks later we were there at the pier and he patiently went through the basics with the boy.  There was very little to explain.  It was just a cane pole – a hollow pole, some string, a bobber, some weights, and a hook.  I baited his hook and he plopped it into the water.

Less than forty-five seconds later he saw the bobber get yanked under and he pulled on the rod as instructed.  His first fish!!!  He was amped, I was amped… Anything that happened from that moment on was pure gravy.  I (following the instruction of the coworker) removed the fish without getting stabbed too badly and threw it back.  Meh… at least I know now what it feels like to do it wrong and what to avoid in the future.

He tried again, and this time it took him twice as long to catch another one (same size as the first) and plopped another baited hook into the water.  So the kid now has caught two and the adults have caught nothing.  Just as he was grinning and saying “Dad, why haven’t you caught…” I felt a nibble and pulled up my catch.

Now, I am not kidding here when I say it was no bigger than a business card.  They both laughed hugely and I knew I was going to hear about this forever at work, especially when the phone was brought out.  But, as sometimes happens, my friend had put the camera on “video” instead of “photo”. The footage started and after about one second of his accidentally filming the boy started yelling “Help!  Help!”

We looked over to see him struggling with his pole. It looked like he snagged the pier or something and was completely overreacting but when we saw how bowed the pole was we ran over and helped him pull.  Up came this five-pound largemouth bass.

After the excitement died down the friend grabbed his phone to take some pics and I released my catch then grabbed my phone as well.  It was then he realized he had been in video mode all this time.  He set it to the right mode and got some great pictures but here’s the gist of the video: about 15 frames of a camera swinging up to nearly focus on my pathetic fish, overlayed with a boy screaming “Help, help!”, and then the video goes all Blair Witch and the phone cover snaps shut.  The video is totally black from that point on but you can hear a bunch of overlapping voices yelling  “OH MY GOSH!  DAD DAD LOOK LOOK! WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT?! HOLY COW!” followed by unintelligible, excited conversation.  For all the world it looks and sounds like “found footage” from a spacecraft landing or a yeti sighting or something.

I next fish I caught was respectably sized (as were the three that followed), my friend caught seven (he, too, caught a bass, nearly as large as the boy’s… nearly).  The boy caught eleven total.  We were there about an hour and a half.

So, basically, the boy confirmed that everything that he had ever knew about fishing was 100% true.  The littlest guy catches the biggest and/or most fish.  The biggest guy catches the smallest and/or fewest fish.  It takes no longer than sixty seconds to land a fish.  You know… because we live in a cartoon.

It was a good day.

A couple of months later we went again, this time with his grandfather.  The lake near the house we rented was active (rings in the water now and then) but grandpa correctly predicted that the fish wouldn’t bite very much because of how cold it was. I caught one and the boy caught one – both small.  One huge upside to this go-around was that I now can tie the “mystery knot” I had failed at so many times during the volunteer thing I described earlier.  Grandpa was very patient and, in the end, the knot is a trivial thing for even me to remember.  He’s a good teacher and I can now pass this bit of wisdom on to the boy.

So why all the preamble here?  Why not just show off the giant fish, drop the microphone, and walk off stage?  Well, because part of the purpose of this blog is to “remember things I don’t want to forget” (see upper right of sidebar).  If I don’t write this down, the months and years erode away the negative specifics and all I’m left with is a feel-good, Facebook-y “highlights reel”.  But I don’t just write this for “future me”.  I’m writing it for “future him”.  Oh, the boy will always remember the giant fish – no worries there. 

Eventually, though, he’ll be old enough to stumble across this post (it will exist in some form or another… maybe not here, but somewhere) and I hope that when he does he will realize that this isn’t really an article about fishing at all.

I love you, buddy.  Good luck.