fishing on Sand Creek

Sunday late afternoon found me in my garden, weeding and breaking up clumps of soil with my bare hands and pausing every so often to watch the harriers in courtship flight. Sedge wrens chattered, hidden, from the willows in the marsh.

Calvin and Mr. Attitude came out to see what I was doing; after seeing a few earthworms come up as I dug weeds, Calvin decided to dig for some worms for fishing. I told him to go to the next raised bed over, and pull a few weeds while he was at it. It was worth a try, anyway. He soon had five or six plump, large worms. "That should be enough for fishing," he said.

Fishing, I thought. Even though we have access to a very nice fishing hole on Sand Creek, and I know there's a brook trout or two in there, we have very rarely taken the time to go fishing. Calvin will be nine years old next month, old enough to rig his own rod and reel and head to the creek whenever he wants. C'mon. Let's go fishing.

We threw rods and reels, tangled from last summer, into the back of the pickup truck, along with the worms, a small dip net, and I'm not sure how or why the wire mesh creel basket got in there. Then a cooler with a jug of peach iced tea, and Sally, and off we went to the fishing hole.

Two rods and reels were detangled and rigged, and we decided that was enough for now. Calvin and Starflower casted, reeled in, got tangled, casted again. The pool has a slight eddy current, so the bobbers were constantly on the move. Sally bounded around, lapping water from the edge of the stream, and finally she could not resist the urge to jump in; surprised, she climbed out, shook herself off, and decided to stay out of the water after that.

We probably did not have the right strategy. The worms had dried out a little during transport and were not too lively. This was more a first-time learning experience. But we did not come up empty-handed.

A creek chub, all of four inches in length, went for the worm. We tried to keep it in the creel basket, but it swam out through the mesh. Oh well, there will be more lazy afternoons fishing, many more, I promise.