My nephew, Sam, was a big baby and he was almost always the biggest boy in his class—eventually playing college football with a healthy scholarship.
My nephew Sam’s “purple pole” coho caught with a spoon and Silver Horde Stubby Dodger.
But this editorial doesn’t start or end there; rather, go back 20 years to when my brother Alan (Sam’s dad) gave me a call and asked if Sam could come along on the Lake Michigan fishing trip we had planned a few days later.
I started taking my own son along on salmon fishing trips when he was just five years old. He did just fine catching what we called in Indiana “spring cohos” which are mostly two or three pounders in March and April. Wade had been reeling in sun-fish from farm ponds for a couple of years by then, so his hands and arms had “muscle memory” when it came to handling a rod and reel. Sam was probably as big at age three as my son was at age five.
So, when brother Alan asked, I said, “Sure! We’ll see how he handles the gear and I bet he can reel in a few with a bit of help.”
Sam and Alan showed up at my house the night before our trip so we could get an early start the next morning. Sam came in carrying a bright purple “kiddy combo.” “Uncle Mike,” he said, “I got this fishing pole for my birthday. Do you think we can catch a salmon on it?”
I realized it was far from an ideal outfit for much more than a farm-pond bluegills, but I also knew catching a salmon with it would thrill Sam 100 times more than reeling one in on one of my rods. So I looked it over and said, “Only one way to find out, we’ll give it a try. But first, let’s check it out.”
I took the reel and first checked the line. It looked like the standard six-pound “cheapo” monofilament common on most of these teeny-rod spincast combos. I explained to Sam, “The only thing we ought to do is take off this line and fill up the reel with something stronger—strong enough to not break when a salmon bites.”
These mini-spincasters don’t hold much line and probably wouldn’t function with the 20-pound mono most of my rods were spooled with so I sorted through my supply of fishing line and found a spool of 14-pound mono to use. It wouldn’t provide enough line to allow using the combo as a planer-board set but it would be fine for coupling it up with a shallow-set downrigger. It wasn’t ideal, but there was a good bite going on so it would probably illicit a few bites.
The next morning it didn’t get the first bite, or the second. In fact, though a steady parade of cohos bit on the planer boards and diver sets, Sam’s rod wasn’t touched. The fish count went up and up. One limit, then another was in the cooler; I was counting to make sure our tally was right, seventeen, eighteen—I was about the say, nineteen, we need one more fish for our four-person limit when I heard a sound like what I’d imagine dropping a couple of plastic forks into a meatgrinder would be.
I looked over at Sam’s bright purple outfit and saw it was bent over all the way to the handle. I wasn’t sure if the sound was from the rudimentary drag inside the reel or if it was the plastic drive gears being ground to oblivion. If it was the gears, there was enough left of them to get the fish reeled up to the net. Success!
Sam and Alan were fishing with me last spring, again for “spring cohos” when Sam told me, “Uncle Mike, remember when I caught that coho on my purple kiddy pole? It’s one of my earliest memories of my life. I don’t ever remember being more excited.”
The point is, never pass up a chance to take a kid fishing. You just never know how much one special fish or one memorable fishing trip can be a positive influence for the rest of his or her life.
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