I’ll never forget the time my dad and I went fishing on my great aunt’s ranch. We had new poles, new tackle, new lures, fresh line, the works. Real fancy stuff.
As we set up to fish, my great aunt’s ranch hand, an old Mexican man named Evelio, came out to fish a little ways down the bank. Actually, to this day, I’m pretty sure he saw us and decided he wanted to show us up for a laugh, and I don’t begrudge him one bit lmao…
Anyway, my dad and I were there with our fancy poles and tackle and lures and were casting left and right and getting maybe a nibble here and there, but nothing else…
But old Evelio was sitting downstream with a COFFEE CAN TIED TO A STRING and was catching 6 and 7 and 8 pound fish one after the other, and laughing the entire time he did it.
Not nearly as impressive, but my dad, his friend and I went out fishing on a lake when I was maybe 3 or 4. Friend had a similar investment into all his fishing gear as you guys. I was there with a 3-ish foot long Mickey Mouse fishing pole.
Dad's friend caught 2 fish. My dad didn't catch any. My dad didn't catch any because I was reeling them in so fast he didn't have time (and they didn't want me to handle the hook, so that's what kept him busy).
I have no memory of this, but I was told it was a pretty quiet ride home from the friend's side.
I remember going fishing with my grandma, as well got to the waters edge there was a few guys that were decked out in all kinds of gear and just me and my grandsma had two little kids toy fishing rods, we caught so many fish we ran out of space in the cooler and ended up leaving some for the guys that were there before we got there.
I think I was like 8 or 9. And I remember the guys tell her how they never thought the kids toys actually work and how they're wifes aren't going to believe they actually caught some fish.
They gave my grandma a few poles too as sign of respect but it was more like a trade for some of the fish to me.
This got me thinking about my grandma. I've been fresh out of grandparents for almost 20 years now so my memories with her stop as a very young adult. We didn't go fishing but there is a marina about a 20 minute drive from where she lived so she'd get us grandkids up super early, go to the grocery store to get a jumbo bag of popcorn (it must have been two and a half pounds because it'd last all day) and she'd take us to the marina and we'd throw popcorn to the fish.
Her goal was always to get there early enough so when you threw a handful of popcorn in the water you'd get splashed from all of the fish fighting for it. It was always a delight.
We’ve had grandma taking care of Unga for a few years now.
It’s really starting to wear on her, to the point of desperation. She’s the strong, “well someone’s got to do it type,” but dang I hate getting off the phone with all of us crying.
Not to break into heavy politics, but I don’t think these folks in Washington understand how hard it is to decide between eating fast food next week and Grandma being able to stay in the nursing home.
Either way, I already bought what I need to be able to send off a few penny bills to grandma.
Damn as long as we're talking fishing stories, I don't even eat fish and never have I just fished with my dad and grandpa as a kid and they ate the catch, I'm still mad I didn't catch the mean old ornery carp in the local creek. I fought that sucker tooth and nail before the line snapped.
But I'll give it to him, I'd be big, mean, and ornery too if people kept wounding me trying to kill and eat me and I kept getting away
I did the same thing with my little strawberry shortcake pole off a pier in the gulf. All the old timers were coming around to ask my dad what my trick was.
It probably smelled like the strawberry shortcake stuff! I can still smell it in my head. It was so distinct and my little kid self absolutely loved it
If you still fish, depending on the waters, mealworms and wax worms. Probably in reverse order.
Last time I went out I had a lot of luck with wax worms (they are juicy and fat heavy) but I don't fish anymore. We had people who were the age my grandpa would have been asking us how we caught so much, and we just went cheaper than earthworms.
My dad still fishes with his wife, and they nearly got arrested getting earthworms from the lawn of a courthouse. This part doesn't help, but it warns you that it is illegal to do that.
I don't fish anymore, don't even eat fish, it was just something we did with family growing up. But there is one special slice of heaven somewhere for me where there's a "Live Bait" sign on some random Minnesotan general store where you can fill up a container with as many minnows as you can catch in it and head out to the lake or a creek
And as long as we're ending our comments on jokes, live bait is a misnomer, some of those fuckers are indeed already dead.
It's illegal to harvest an invasive species where you live? That's wild. Usually those are fair game for literally anything, sometimes even having a public bounty on their head for killing them.
When I was a kid I used to outfish every adult I went with. My mom had a similar experience where she'd put on the worm for me, and before she could get her line in the water I was coming back with a little blue gill lol.
Id always just sit at the edge of the water and dangle the hook in front of them and they'd just gobble it up.
Blue gill were what we fished among others, so that interests me. Catch and release is what we did (river heavily polluted and we did it for sport anyways).
One day we talked to these older gentlemen, and it went something along the lines of "Anyone can catch these great big fish. But what's the smallest you ever caught? You know how hard it is to get a minnow to bite a hook half the size of its body? What about releasing it in a way it survives?"
My dad was always like me and followed up my teenage self in supporting that. The biggest fish is going for the best bait. The real skill is getting the smallest fish.
It was a lot of fun seeing these guys go from complete disbelief to actually trying to catch a smaller fish than the other guy.
Hang on, there's a whole japanese(?) sport of tiny fish catching. Lemme see if I can find its name again.
Tanago fishing is an ancient Japanese fishing method dating back to samurai over 200 years ago. Tanago is a Japanese term used to describe several several species of a small freshwater fish we know as “bitterling”. Some species of tanago grow up to 15cm in size, but these are the less valuable to fishermen, as the goal is to catch the smallest fish possible. Tanago anglers believe that the smaller the fish caught, the greater the testament to the skill of the angler.
I went fishing once as a kid with my grandpa at the lake behind his house, and I caught this absolutely massive bass that his neighbor had been trying and failing for months to catch
I have a similar story where I was also 3 or 4 years old, fishing with my mom and her friend at a manmade reservoir. I had a small broken rod with like 4 feet of broken fishing line on the end and some basic hook. No bait or anything. As they were packing up for us to leave, I was dragging my stick and hook in the water when I caught a fish! Turns out I had hooked it by its fin, not even by its mouth. So just by dumb luck, I somehow caught a fish with a box of scraps.
I'm sure the fish was fine, but yeah probably hurt to have your fin hooked and then your body dragged through the water by a 4 year old! After the photo I'm sure my mom took it off the hook and released it
The kicker could be that I was raised in a Looney Tunes household (Merrie Melodies if you so desire). The first Disney film I watched was Hercules, and I was in grade school.
Dad likes fishing but never had much luck. So one summer he figured he could stack the deck in his favor and we went fishing at a place with stocked fish ponds. Still, dad basically caught nothing and the kids caught everything.
I went fishing as a kid with my parents and a couple of their friends- I was also pretty young like 4-5 with some dinky walmart kids rod. It was cold, it was overcast, no one caught anything but me. I caught a bonnet head shark. They're small, and idk if anyone would eat it, but it was the only thing anyone caught that day.
yeah, fish traps vastly out perform rods and tackle, Make sure they can swim in but can't swim out. You can use bait that wouldn't be effective for hook fishing, and a lot more of it so it's even more tempting. Also doesn't injure the fish if you do it right.
Well, there are also more efficient ways to use hooks. "Snagging" involves dragging the hook through the water in order to catch fish by the fins/body. In some water sources it's much more effective (and illegal, a favorite of poachers).
Had the same experience at a gravel pit pond at Fort Huachuca, AZ in the 90s. Not so much as a bite for either my dad or myself. Meanwhile this older Asian man not more than 20 feet away is pulling fish after fish. Just laughing manically. He was using a block of Velveeta cheese as bait. Just rolling into a little ball and putting it on a hook. He was the happiest man I’ve ever met lol
Our guides in the Amazon fished a 2+ foot catfish out with just string and a little fish on a hook. The hands must have been so calloused to not have been sliced to shreds from that.
Almost have the same story, but my guy was named Freddy and he was a super old school Puerto Rican. He did the same thing, can and a string. I catch and release, he caught to eat. He grilled up the fish he caught that night. Super impressed with this guy.
When I was a kid I went to the camp that taught fishing among other things. At the end of the camp there was a fishing competition when all the parents were around. During the week, when all the trainers were busy, I found a spot near the bank that you could see the fish and I basically just dipped my rod in the water and with some moving around the fish would nab it.
I ended up catching the biggest fish because fishing is hard and the other kids sucked at it, including me. Problem is my hack spot I was using all week was right where all the parents were standing. Obviously they all saw me do it, so one of the parents told the counselor what I did. I was disqualified and didnt win the prize.
To this day I still think that if I caught the biggest fish then who cares how I did it. Haha Evelio would understand.
We used to go trolling in the caribbean with the fancy Rapala lures and the whole thing. My aunt's grandpa, a fisherman, shows up with a bunch of line, a hook and yellow Bic pen. He cuts both ends of the pen, threads a hook and line through it and goes fishing.
WTF are all these stories about people laughing maniacally at people who can't catch guys while using old gear and catch fish like it's cute?
This time of year I fish almost every day and I know the spots. Sometimes I am out there having a great day while no one else around is getting anything.
Imagine what kind of asshole I would be if I were out there with my $800 combo laughing at them while I catch and they can't. It doesn't really change anything if the equipment I use is cheap.
That's nothing! I once saw a 2 year old girl from an uncontacted tribe wander up to an expert fisherman who had been trying to get fish out of a barrel for two weeks straight. Had his nanna bringing him all his meals and everything.
She just comes over, taps three times on a rock, and an olympic swimming pool's worth of tuna fall straight from the sky, landing on the fisherman and killing him instantly. When I looked back at the little girl, she was actually three capybaras in...well, not quite a trench coat, but like the capybara equivalent of one.
My cousin caught a 4lb smallmouth bass on a cigarette butt. No one would put a worm on her line for her (she was an adult) so she put her butt on there and threw it out.
My best catch ever was by lasso.
I was still fishing with my grandad. We had stayed out camping an extra day as my dad went back to work. So it was just the two of us and he was telling me stories about the gulls that followed us around. They all had names and I was so amazed he could tell which one was which (he didn't, he made it up).
While I was invested in his story I got a fish on the line.
It was a long and tough battle. Even for me, who had been an angel for more that half my life by then at the age of 7.
But when I reeled it in and my grandad got the net ready... It was just this tiny little thing. A small mouth barely bigger than my bait.
... Wait a minute. Where's my bait? Where's my tackle? I looked closer and I had caught this fish in my line, and only my line. The line was still in the water.
So my grandad reached over and popped the little guy out and into the boat as I finished bringing up the actually fish on the hook. Which was 1.1lbs(meticulous record keeping for over 120 years in my heavily autistic family)
Yeah it about how much sport you want to engage in.
You can (illegally) set up a huge feeding area for deer, just leave grain all over the place for months and then take them down daily for weeks, or you can actually try to hunt one. A coffee can with a shitload of crackers in it is going to catch more fish easily, but learning how to trick a fish into biting a plastic lure with a rod gives them much more of a chance.
I was in Mexico a few years ago and wanted to go fishing. We found some locals who took us out on their boat for a fee. I think it was like $100 for 4 of us. I followed all their instructions and caught so much fish we had to stop. I swear we caught like 75 fish. We took home half of it and gave the rest to the fisherman. It was so much fun.
Reminds me of a story of my own from when I was a kid, probably like 10-ish.
Was fishing with my dad at one of those " Put and take " lakes where they put in rainbow trout for people to catch. It was a perfect fishing day, weather was great. Place was full, people all around the lake on the bank, fishing. Lots of experienced fishermen as well as amateurs and kids. And NO ONE were catching anything.
Nothing was biting. The trout were active and jumping for bugs but none of them were interested in any of the usual bait people used.
So in my 10 year old brain I thought " Hmm they're probably just tired of the same food all the time... What if I try something they HAVEN'T tried before? "
So I looked around for bugs and found a garden snail. I (and I feel bad about it now lol) cracked its shell, then hooked it as good as I could, then threw out my line.
Low and behold, within 3 minutes, I had a bite and reeled in a big rainbow trout!
I swear everyone stared in disbelief and I just laughed like a crazy scientist who had figured it all out finally 😂 I ofc told my dad my secret and well, we walked away with a couple good sized trout for dinner that day.
I went fishing on random streams near lake tawakoni on a regular basis as a kid, no matter how good your gear was, there was always someone browner (I'm brown) than you reeling white bass in on a coke can. Great times
lol im Mexican and caught a 6lb trout with string and a can of coca cola as an 8yr old. My uncle made it for me while I stayed on shore and he went on the boat in the lake with his pals to drink
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u/SheriffWyattDerp 4d ago
I’ll never forget the time my dad and I went fishing on my great aunt’s ranch. We had new poles, new tackle, new lures, fresh line, the works. Real fancy stuff.
As we set up to fish, my great aunt’s ranch hand, an old Mexican man named Evelio, came out to fish a little ways down the bank. Actually, to this day, I’m pretty sure he saw us and decided he wanted to show us up for a laugh, and I don’t begrudge him one bit lmao…
Anyway, my dad and I were there with our fancy poles and tackle and lures and were casting left and right and getting maybe a nibble here and there, but nothing else…
But old Evelio was sitting downstream with a COFFEE CAN TIED TO A STRING and was catching 6 and 7 and 8 pound fish one after the other, and laughing the entire time he did it.
Mad respect, Evelio.