Last of the Pack

Throughout junior high and high school, three of my buddies and I went trout fishing every evening after school. We lived by a lake where they stocked trout, and not many of the residents fished. The trout were ours for the taking and many good meals were the result, a welcome help to feeding our families.

We fished together in the late 1960’s through the early 1970’s. Recently I learned about Bob Guerra dying. I am the last living of the four—a chilling thought.

We were a group of young anglers determined to outfish each other. A good day on the water meant catching our limit of two trout, especially when the other guys were skunked. We enjoyed aggravating each other.

We threw small spoons and spinners, eventually discovering Al’s Goldfish spoons, my game changer and the best trout lure ever with the exception of flies off a flyrod.

When I first showed up with an Al’s Goldfish spoon, my two trout were quickly caught and the guys held me down while stealing that hot lure. They lost my cherished spoon on the first cast, hooked in a crappie bed. Later that summer I dived down with a diving mask to pick bass lures off the limbs. I thought it would be easy to spot the shiny spoon, but it was gone.

Them holding me down was not surprising, the kind of dirty tricks we played on each other. Once we poured sand into one of our friend’s reels. He quickly realized something was terribly wrong when the reel handle stopped turning and took the Zebco 33 reel’s facing off to pour out the coarse grains while describing us in unsavory terms that probably made our long-gone ancestors angry. I had an extra reel hidden in my jacket pocket he was happy to use. I never got that reel back, as if he knew the sand idea was mine—it was.

On a particularly warm spring day, we found a nice garter snake and gently put it in one of the other guy’s tacklebox. We could not have imagined that the snake would be in the frame of mind to strike when he put his hand in for a lure. I quickly released the snake for its own safety while our friend rolled around on the ground holding his hand and reciting every cuss word in the dock worker’s dictionary. I worked on the docks years ago and got a first-hand education of these inventive phrases that my friend somehow already knew.

Probably one of the dirtiest tricks we ever pulled was inviting one of the guy’s girlfriend fishing with us on a warm afternoon. It seems he had told her about going to work and being unable to accept her invitation to do homework at her house. She was a pretty girl and the three of us thought he was crazy. He was shocked when she came strolling down the lake bank to join us and she was angry at first sight of him. That did not help their relationship,

Sometimes opportunities just happen. One of the guys showed up with a spoon dangling off the end of his fiberglass rod. He tied it on before leaving the house and laid the outfit down to walk down the bank.

One of us, not saying it was me, took a pair of needlenosed pliers and clipped off the treble hook points just past the curve. The trout were really biting that day and he set the hook several times without success.

The other three of us were grinning like Cheshire cats while watching him repeatedly set the hook and miss. He was a very good fisherman, so it was surprising he did not take a closer look at the spoon dangling off the end of his rod after no fish lips were hooked.

Finally, someone suggested that he take a closer look at his spoon. He did not say a word, just packed his tackle up and walked home to a chorus of our snickering. We knew paybacks were coming and it did later that summer.

The three of us loaded up in an old boat one evening that was just good enough to row to a nearby crappie bed and dunk minnows we caught in a nearby creek. We had barely slipped away from the dock when a realization of water around our feet brought on genuine concern. Suddenly the boat started sinking. We were all good swimmers, but our fishing tackle sank with the boat.

He had removed the boat plug and drilled a couple of extra holes in the bow and stern. We were swimming to shore while he stood on the dock, saluting and humming the National Anthem, interrupted by occasional outbursts of his wild laughter. He could not run as fast as us and was soon thrown in the lake. Later I dove down and retrieved most of our fishing tackle, but to my knowledge, that boat is still down there with the fish.

We occasionally played dirty tricks on each other, but mostly we fished and hunted together. My friends are gone now but will never be forgotten. If there is a lake in Heaven, I wonder what kind of dirty tricks they have planned for my arrival? I look forward to it.