The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

I was 5 or 6 years old the first time my dad took me fishing. That likely prompts mental images of the opening credits of “The Andy Griffith Show,” but that’s not at all what my first experience with a rod and reel looked like.

My dad, you see, practiced a very specific and highly ritualized form of fishing. The process began the night before. Just before nightfall, dad hooked a sprinkler up to our garden hose and saturated a 20-foot square of our backyard. While the water was running, he descended to the deepest recesses of our basement and emerged with a rusty green Coleman lantern that looked like it had been purchased sometime during the Neothilic Epoch, a can of fuel and a small package of what looked like tiny cloth bags. He placed the lantern on our picnic table and deftly disassembled it, then placed the tiny bags at the end of two pipettes and reassembled it. He then filled the reservoir with fuel, pumped a little lever a few times and put a lit match to the bags. The lantern made a pleasant hissing sound as it erupted into light. Satisfied, dad turned off the fuel flow and set the lantern aside.

Next, he gathered an old coffee can from his shed, walked over to our newly-tilled garden and added a few handfuls of dirt. 

By this time dusk had given way to darkness. Dad turned off the water and retrieved a red flashlight, one of those that took a big 6-volt battery.

“Why don’t we just use the lantern,” I asked innocently? 

“Because we want a thin beam of light, not to light up the whole dang backyard,” he replied with that “geez, you’re slow” tone he so often affected when explaining things. For all his positive characteristics, my father was imbued with the patience of European royalty, a trait which my wife will tell you does not skip a generation. 

Nightcrawlers, dad explained, come to the surface to breathe when the soil is saturated with water. I have no idea if that’s accurate, but it rang true then and still does now. The idea is to sneak up on them and snatch them up before they can return to their holes. The catch is that they generally don’t completely emerge and they have a surprisingly strong “grip.” You have to pull with a gentle pressure so as not to break them. According to dad, if you break the worm and then put it in the can with the others, all of them will die. Again, I have no idea whether that’s true, but dad certainly believed it. Once we had pulled about a dozen ’crawlers and put them in the can, we called it a night.

The next day, a Saturday, dawned with great anticipation. I ate my cereal and watched my cartoons and played with my truck in the sandbox, but the whole time I was thinking about fishing. Dad, for his part, mowed the grass and puttered in his shed. As usual, we ate supper around 4 and dad sat down and read the paper. I was as antsy as a puppy drinking coffee.

Finally, the sun began to set and dad rose from his chair, assembled the equipment in the trunk of our ’62 Chevy Biscayne and we headed the mille down the road to the Sandusky Bay. The road sat about 10 feet above the rocky gravel shore and you had to kind of surf-slide down the embankment. A precarious feat under any circumstances, but a particularly hazardous one while carrying, rods, reels, a tackle box and chairs. It took dad several trips to shlep all our stuff to the fishing spot. A couple of other people had already set up and dad greeted them as we passed. 

Most of our fellow fishermen were older black men. The area where I grew up was not racially diverse and what diversity we had was mostly Hispanic. Dad said that these men came from Cleveland, which always struck me as a little odd, since there was a whole freaking lake between here and there and our little bend in the road on the bay was hardly a vacation hotspot.

We settled into our spot as the last rays of the sun disappeared over the western horizon, and dad fired up the Coleman. We brought four rods, all of which were well-worn and configured with old-fashioned, open-face, bait-casting reels. I was assigned the smallest of them, a five-foot tan fiberglass rod with a green metal handle and maroon reel. All of the outfits were rigged exactly the same, with what I now refer to as the Gypsum Rig. Each reel was spooled with heavy white nylon line, similar to what you might buy today for a kite. Monofilament line was available in the ’60s, but dad hated the stuff. At the terminal end, dad tied a 3- or 4-inch piece of rubber that had been cut from a discarded inner tube. And then an additional 3-foot length of line with two swivel clips about a foot apart and a 2-ounce sinker tied at the very end. To the swivel clips, he attached #1 bait hooks and threaded a ’crawler on each.

Dad used a side-arm casting technique in which he laid the hooks and sinker on the ground directly behind him and then swung his arm wide with an upward motion. The trick to bait-casting reels, of course, is the thumb action. You need to apply exactly the right tension to prevent the reel from spinning faster than the line, and to stop the reel at exactly the moment the sinker hits the water or you will get a nasty “backlash” or “bird’s nest.” In all the years I fished with my father, I think I might have seen him backlash two or three times, all on windy days when it’s extremely difficult to judge the line speed. Let me also say that it’s not a skill that comes naturally to a 5-year-old. The advantage, I quickly learned, of the braided nylon line over monofilament is that it is much easier to untangle.

Eventually, I did manage to get a couple of worms to the bottom of the bay. After that, it was just a waiting game. The Sandusky Bay has five primary species of gamefish: channel catfish, bullhead catfish, freshwater drum (what we called sheepshead), carp and white perch. Shore fishing in those days, you might occasionally catch a yellow perch, but they were few and far between. Our primary quarry that night was channel catfish. This species of catfish can grow to sizes of 50 pounds or more, but are more typically in the 7-12 pound range.

We sat on the bank for what seemed like forever, then the tip of one of dad’s rods pitched down suddenly. In one surprisingly quick motion, dad jumped from his chair, scooped up the rod, pulled back to set the hook and started reeling in the fish. It was a channel cat, probably 7 or 8 pounds, and put up a good fight for its size. Once onshore, dad removed the hook and slipped it on to our stringer, demonstrating the proper way to handle a catfish without getting “stung.” 

Over the next couple of hours, we caught a few more fish on dad’s lines. He let me reel in one of them, a smaller bullhead, but there was no action on my rod, despite me checking and resetting it every 30 minutes or so. At last, I got a bite. I jumped up and set the hook in the mirror image of my dad, and reeled in my prize catch. It was a small sheepshead. I was a little disappointed that my first fish ever was a trash species and a small one at that, but at least I had caught something. Having accomplished that, we packed everything up and headed back to the car with our stringer of catfish. 

The next day, dad showed me how to skin and clean them, then mom fried them up for Sunday dinner. Catfish are bottom feeders – they skim along the muck looking for anything that might be edible – and their flesh tends to take on the taste of whatever they ingest. The catfish you eat at your local diner is farm-raised, fed a carefully blended fish food and prevented from eating anything that might spoil the taste. In the 1960s, industry was less, shall we say, “vigilant” about what they dumped into the water, and there were many industries on the Sandusky Bay. Basically, the catfish were eating toxic sludge and that is precisely how they tasted. That was some seriously disgusting fish! To this day, I am reluctant to eat anything I catch unless it comes from a pristine mountain stream. 

What was your first fishing experience? What did you catch?