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Fishing fun with Grandma and Grandpa Speck
When we first came back home (from our oilfield and Atomic
Energy Commission employment) and would sit along the banks of the river, oh how
Ed would cuss the wind as he tried to catch those little catfish that were too
small to keep, or those dirty, nasty yellow carp that fought like wildcats and
gave you your thrills for the day. He stopped fishing because of the wind.
Before Ed's employment ended and he, too, moved home, Grandma and Grandpa
Speck and I would go fishing two, three, four times a day. We'd fish about 30-45
minutes and if nothing happened, we would go home and "come back later." Or, if
we started catching carp, we would leave because everyone knows when the carp
come in, the cats go away. Or, we'd get into a school of babies that would clean
the hookpractically every time and those we accidentally caught we would throw
back.
Not Grandpa Speck! He would not throw a fish back in. "You throw your luck
away," he'd say. Seems to me if your luck was to catch five to six -inch fish,
you'd want to throw it (your luck) back in! Soon, he figured out how to get out
of cleaning the little things and Grandma and I ended up doing it, so we made a
"Grandpa" rule that if the fish wasn't as long as the tackle box it had to
thrown back in the river. He not like that rule at all, but we stuck t our guns.
As Grandpa got older and the eyesight got worse, the fishing days started
growing shorter. Oh how we would laugh at him -no, with him. He would be sitting
in his old chair, half asleep, and maybe get a bite, maybe not. Whatever. All of
a sudden he would be up and alert and jerking on his pole. It would practically
bend in two, it had to be a "whopper." He would pull the pole back, reel it in,
pole the pole back and reel it in, so excited about his fish. Then would come
the "darn, I lost him." Here's the deal. Since he was older and more feeble, he
couldn't throw the line out like he used to, so, what do you do to make the line
go farther out? Put more weights on, or in Grandpa's case, more BIGGER weights.
It was all he could do to reel in his weights, let along the added weight of a
fish if he should happen to catch one! Sometimes when he would reel out, he
would almost follow the line into the water.
But, back to Ed cussing the wind. One day he was introduced to fishing
along the banks up north with a fierce south-westerly wind and brought home a
dozen four to eight-pounders and he was hooked. No more fishing south of the
house for him. His mother and I went with him one day to check it out and we
helped him fill his buckets with big fish. What a day and it is lots more fun to
bring in big fish than those little ones that really can't put up a decent
fight. I think the biggest fish Grandma thought she caught that day was
the 230 pound guy who was hiding in the bush behind her jerking on her line!
Sometimes something like that makes the whole day.
That, or the day she couldn't catch a fish if her life depended on it and
Ed was bringing them in one right after the other. He was teasing her so much
she called him a bad name and picked up her chair and tackle box and huffed off
to the other side of the landing. Didn't do her any good. There were no fish
over there at all, not to mention the lack of wind. Said God was punishing her
because she called her son a bad name. She was probably right.
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