Bait

OK, I’m on a fishing theme so allow me to continue for just one more day. As a kid who enjoyed fishing and spent so much time at it; purchasing bait was out of the question. The important part of any fishing expedition was to collect your own bait, be it minnows, worms or crayfish. My father was big on hellgrammites which were nasty little Dobson fly larva. They had nasty pinchers. I only collect them on rare occasion and n ever liked them.

Night crawlers were the preferred bait, and easy to get on warm summer evenings. I would water a patch of ground before dark and then wait. Once it got dark I would go out with a dim flash light and catch crawlers, which are large earth worms who come partially out of their holes at night and look for a mate. They could feel the heat from the light and they would shoot quickly back into their hole so it was important to not shine the light directly them.

After a while I learned to hold the flashlight in my mouth which freed me to capture a worm in each hand. In no time I had a couple dozen worms which would last me for a day of fishing.

One year while planning a fishing trip to Canada my brother and I collected night crawlers for weeks. We stored them in a Styrofoam ice chest with soil. We kept them fed and watered. We were going to be in Canada for a couple weeks so we knew that we need a lot of worms to hold us over.

Unfortunately when we got to the Canadian border the border guard discovered the worms and made us dump them out. Had they been in recycled newspaper it would have been OK, but we weren’t allowed to bring soil into Canada.

OK, plan B… We got to the lake and we immediately went swimming for crayfish. We didn’t have a trap, so we had to snorkel and lift wood and debris from the sandy lake bottom, which exposed the crayfish that were hiding from day light. Then you come up from behind them and snatch them and throw them into a minnow bucket with a lid.

After a couple hours we had a hundred or so, and then we transferred them into the Styrofoam cooler that once held the worms. We put the lid on the cooler, and left it in the boat.

The next morning all the crayfish were gone. We had forgotten about how much raccoons loved crayfish. On to plan C.