Before I was old enough to drive, my friends and I found unusual places to fish within bicycle range of our houses between days when our fathers could take us “real” fishing.
We identified several pleasure pits, numbering each as Fishing Hole 1, 2, and so on. Although we found a couple of small ponds within bicycling range, “hole” really did describe most of these wide spots in roadside ditches or drainage canals. Most reached depths of only 1 or 2 feet deep, but to us, they represented honeyholes of freedom from chores, nagging mothers, cleanliness, homework, responsibility, girls and everything else preteen boys despised.
During school, when we should have paid more attention to homework assignments, we planned our adventures down to the last details with more intricate maneuvers than the Allies used to land in Normandy. “Okay, let’s go to FH 7 Saturday at 7 a.m. sharp. Keep it a secret from those other guys. We don’t want them fishing our hole.”
As the chosen day approached, we scoured our freezers for bait – frozen shrimp, chicken livers, gizzards, old hot dogs, bread, cheese or whatever our mothers wouldn’t terribly miss. Sometimes, we pooled our allowances to buy real worms or night crawlers. On rare occasions, we actually had shiners.
When we couldn’t scrounge sufficient bait, we caught our own. We scooped crawfish and grass shrimp from roadside ditches. We snatched grasshoppers and crickets from vacant lots. We overturned pine straw to capture succulent worms. We kept some smaller fish from previous expeditions for cut bait.
With bait secured, we stuffed stringers, pocketknives and other essential equipment into our pockets, grabbed the bait bag in one hand and the tackle box in the other and stretched our rods across the handlebars. Then we peddled our bicycles as fast as we could to our chosen honeyhole. Fortunately, we didn’t have nearly the amount of tackle then that we find so necessary now.
During most outings, our adventures turned into all-day affairs. Although we thought to bring bait, rods, knives, lures, stringers and other equipment, we seldom remembered drinks or food. The fishing adventures usually ended when either we ran out of bait or hunger pains drove us home. We usually caught a few small fish, but “catching” didn’t matter as much as “fishing.” Those were the days.