Gone Fishing (standard:non fiction, 1561 words)
Author: Lou Hill	Added: May 26 2002	Views/Reads: 3345/2241	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A true fish story

GONE FISHING 

Like most boys who grew up in rural Vermont, I always enjoyed fishing. I
am not as fanatical about it now as I used to be, but I still like to 
get out on a stream or a lake once in a while. 

My great-uncle, Minot Austin, started me fishing when I was about five
or six.  It is the Austin genes that generate the love of hunting and 
fishing in our family.  He cut a branch about five feet long off a 
tree, trimmed it, wound some old fish line on the end, crimped on a 
split-shot sinker, then tied on a small safety pin.  He figured that he 
had better use the old fashioned way to get me started so that I 
wouldn't do too much damage to anybody that I  might accidentally hook, 
especially myself.  I was a noted klutz even then. 

We dug up some worms out in the garden and put them in an old pipe
tobacco can.  Those pipe tobacco cans were my bait-boxes for years.  
They fit into a back pocket perfectly and had a convenient cover to 
keep the worms from spilling out.  I didn't get a fancy bait-box that 
looped on my belt until I was in high school. 

We headed down to the pool in the bend of Tyler Branch just across the
road from my grandmother's house in West Enosburg. Uncle Minot baited 
up with half a worm, swung the hook and line out into the water and 
almost instantaneously pulled out a wiggling fish.  The pool was filled 
with trash fish: minnows, shiners, chubs; they had many names.  He 
handed me the rod and soon I was catching fish as fast as I could throw 
in the line.  The fish weren't the only thing hooked. 

I quickly graduated to a real fishing rod.  Granted it was a
hand-me-down.  Uncle Minot gave me one of his old steel telescoping 
rods for my very own.  Soon I was spending most of my time down at the 
branch, perfecting my fishing technique. 

It was about this time that I met my lifelong friend Wendall Corron. 
Wendall, who is two years older than I, was as crazy about fishing as I 
was. However in his case fishing was more important as it often 
provided a meal for his family. 

For the next ten years, Tyler Branch and trout fishing were the center
of our lives.  Both of us like to hunt, but we lived for fishing.  In 
the summer, not a day went by that we didn't spend a few hours at the 
branch fishing.  In the winter we spent most of our time talking about 
fishing. 

We were pretty good fishermen too.  We could always catch trout even on
the hot days of summer when the water was low and they were 
particularly difficult to get to bite.  We had our favorite tricks and 
methods, one of which would usually work. 

One evening about a year after the end of WWII, we spotted someone
fishing in our favorite hole.  We considered this particular spot our 
own personal property.  We called it the "big hole" because it was the 
deepest place in that section of the branch, not very original.  
Naturally we investigated to find out who had had the nerve to invade 
our territory. 

The fisherman turned out to be Arnold "Curley" Kittell, an Enosburg man
who had moved to Connecticut during the war and then chose to live 
there.  Curley was a well know fisherman and we had heard many stories 
about his abilities when it came to trout fishing and catching big  
German Brown Trout. We were anxious to find out his methods, so we 
struck up a conversation. 

Curley was not the least bit secretive and proceeded to tell us
everything we wanted to know.  He was using tackle exactly like ours, 
steel rod, bait casting reel with black silk line etc.  However he had 
attached a gut (the forerunner to monofilament) leader about three feet 
long to the silk line with a small barrel swivel.  He opened his cloth 
fishing bag and showed us the bait he was using.  Lying on top of a 
folded seine were about a dozen small minnows.  Curley called them 
"sucker minnows", they had a mouth like a sucker or carp, were about 
three to four inches long, slim, with a black stripe down the side.  
They spawned in early August and Curley had netted them as they tried 
to jump up the falls. 


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