Back to the Basics

About once each year most organizations will go through a ‘back to basics’ training session.  These companies realize personnel will and can get caught up in certain aspects of their positions that they neglect and forget the foundations of what makes them successful.

The same concept can be said of just about anything whether it is business or not.

If you walk into any outdoors department you can be overwhelmed with types of lures, types of rods, bait scents, colored lines of different materials, and even hook styles.  Since every one of the products promises to be the greatest and only item you need to catch more fish, it is a wonder you have ever even had a fish swim by your bait.

One of the newer techniques in fishing is Tenkara.  Basically it is a fly rod without a reel in which you swing your bait over to where the fish are located.  “It is all about approach,” the Tenkara anglers say.

When I was young I learned how to do this and did not even realize it.  Of course, I used what we called a cane pole.  Sometimes we even used a cork but it wasn’t necessary.  We would find a bream bed and just dangle the cricket in the water.

 

If we didn’t have crickets, well we would dig our own worms.  We did not need special imported muscled up super worms.  No, simple earthworms worked.  Maybe, if it was the right time of the year we would collect a few catalpa worms.  I have always pictured the catalpa worm like a chocolate covered long john for fish.

When the fish were really biting we would improvise.  Crickets and worms depleted, we would pull out our lunch bag that our moms packed for us.  The top of the peanut butter sandwich would become our newest bait.  We would pack tight small bread beads and slide it on the hook.  If I were a betting man, I would say that is probably how the open faced peanut butter sandwich came to be.  Someone was pulling in the fish as fast as he could get the hook in the water, ran out of bait, and thought to himself that the fish might like bread.  He then grabbed his sandwich and sacrificed one of the slices of bread in order to increase his catch by a few more.

We also did not have to worry about how to hook the fish or when to set the hook.  We could catch as many fish just by relaxing while the hook was in the water.  We would pass any dead time by laying back and watching the puffy white clouds pass overhead.  In fact, we probably caught more fish by not staring at the line intently as we did while actively waiting for a bite.

Even when we used rod and reel, our baits consisted of lures such as Mister Twisters, Devil’s Horses, Jitterbugs, Hula Poppers, Rooster Tails, and Beetle Spins.  We often picked the lures out based on how cool they looked, the neat sounds they made in the water, or the funny ways in which they ‘swam’ when you reeled them in.

Now, checking the inventory of the fishing isles brings us Alabama Rigs, Umbrella Rigs, and Twin Rigs.  There is nothing special about them other than there are more hooks.  If we wanted to fish with a minnow back then, we either used a live one or a Mepp’s.  We were good enough to catch the lunker with one; we did not need a whole school of them.

The basics, that is what we need to get back to.