Sputterbug
The
Mother’s Day was last weekend, and to be honest, I’m kind of glad it’s over.
I mean, everybody makes such a BIG DEAL about it. Oh sure – moms give birth to, and nurture, us. They make sure we’re fed, tucked-in and taken care of literally and figuratively for as long as they’re able to draw air. But what about dads? Dads do some pretty tough stuff, too… like take the family fishing.
Everybody knows that parable about giving a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Meh… whatever. I look at that whole deal from more from a dad’s perspective in relation to my kids. If a father wants to fish, he has got to teach his kids to fish. I figure a kid can’t truly be self-sufficient at fishing until they are about eight years old. So, if dad wants to someday be able to go fishing without having to bait every hook, tie every knot, untie every tangle and unhook every fish, he’s got to make sacrifices and get to work ASAP.
When I was a kid, I learned to fish around small stock tanks (ponds) where one could fish the whole area by just walking around the bank. The fish, literally, were a captive audience, so the chances of catching one were pretty good. Still, there were never any guarantees.
I have three kids, and they all learned how to fish on stock tanks. The older two got squared away years ago. But the youngest, Miles, is nine, and until last Friday, I thought he still had a ways to go.
It was just my wife Nikki, Miles and me. We got to the tank around 5 p.m. I immediately started tying on lures and setting drags and getting everything ready.
Before I could cast a line, Miles snagged up on limb and I had to break the line, which meant I had to hand over the pole I was gonna use and rig up another. Then, Miles caught a fish and couldn’t get the hook out, so I dropped what I was doing and took care of that. Right about the time I got back to rigging poles, he got a knot in the spool of his reel. I had to cut out about 20 feet of line to get it running again. With that done, I began preemptively organizing lures and swivels and stuff to prepare for whatever else might come my way.
As I was organizing, I came across a lure I’ve had over 50 years: a Fred Arbogast Sputterbug, a topwater popper with an ingeniously engineered mini propeller that, well, “sputters” as you reel it in. It was missing the plastic hula-skirt and the back treble hook only had one barb, but still, it was a thing of beauty.
I put it on my line, walked to the water’s edge and gave it a cast. PLOP! I waited for the concentric circles of waves to dissipate before I started reeling. The water was dead calm save for my sputtering lure. Cast, reel, repeat. I watched Miles catch a nice largemouth bass, and then another. He hooted and hollered but didn’t call for help. Cast, reel, repeat. A familiar rhythm as my mind’s eye saw a kid, from fifty years ago or so, at that same tank with that same lure, catching fish and hooting and hollering to beat all.
SPLASH! My lure disappeared, and after a short fight, I landed about a 12-inch largemouth. Wanting to go out on top like John Elway did when the Broncos won their last Superbowl, I released the fish and hooked the Sputterbug onto my rod, done for the day.
You know, maybe this dad business ain’t so tough after all.
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