Rapala Roof Rescue

The kids were playing in the yard, waiting for me to unlock the truck so we could load up and head off to school.  A beloved stuffed animal, more or less a bean bag in the form of a cat, was being tossed up in the air to pass the time.  Just as I was shutting the front door and turning my key to lock it, I saw the cat - practically in slow motion - take a trajectory that was undoubtedly bound for the roof.

Two stories up, the bean bag thumped on metal.

If we didn't leave inside of ten minutes, we'd all be late.  Rain clouds hung low and heavy.  My daughter, to whom the animal belonged, was melting into a puddle of first grader dispair in the front yard. My son, who'd made the last toss, was apologizing profusely to her - whether he meant it sincerely or was hoping to avoid a beating, one can't be sure.  Maybe both.

I told them to hop in the truck, we'd have to get it later. We'd just moved into the house within the past few months and I knew I didn't own a ladder yet that was tall enough to let me climb on the roof.  It's on the list. I briefly considered driving around to the back of the house where the roof is lower and placing the ladder I do have into the bed of the truck.  That would work, but would eat more time than I had.  Getting this cat wasn't at all necessary, but if I could snap my fingers and get it down right then the day was sure to be sent down a better path than the one it was currently on.

Ideas were coming into my head and being dismissed just as quickly.  The clock was ticking. The truck was running. Tears were flowing.  Rain was just starting to fall. I hated to think of the plush toy soaking up there all day till I could get to it after work.

I did what any angler will do when he needs to solve life's problems -  I thought of my fishing gear. I stepped into my garage, selected a spinning rod off the wall rack, and dug into the pockets of one of the gear bags on the shelf above. I first considered a fly rod for the accuracy and swiftness of repeat casts, but decided trebles and a weightless line would be better.  I tied on a #11 Rapala.  It had already been customized to have only the two rear trebles and the barbs removed - I wanted a nice friendly 'catch-and-release.'

The kids slid out of the truck and gathered around me when they saw the rod.  My daughter was already smiling and laughing and proclaiming the cat as good as rescued.  I warned it might have to wait till evening if I didn't get it right away.

Missed the first shot.  Lined it with the second. Hooked it on the third. Hopped it over the gutter and dropped it into the yard. My son would have preferred I used 'the Force,' but I'd done the next best thing in my book.

For about two seconds I held somewhat of a superhero status, but then it quickly faded back to normal and we were off to school.  Kids under 8 or 9 just expect the supernatural from their dads. No biggie - another catastrophe averted, another threat to civilization squelched.  I blew the smoke from the muzzle of my fishing rod and holstered it into the passenger seat of the truck. Always travel with fishing gear and keep the skills sharp - you never know when you are going to need them.

At the end was a rainbow, or two.

After a day of field work I found myself within 10 miles of a nice little tailwater I like to hit on occasion. It's always well worth the stop. And if I have time I like to hike a distance below the dam. It's a river I find buffalo bones in sometimes, remnants of
bygone days melting away with time. Once I came across a nearly complete skull. The river is not known as a trout fishery, except maybe in the extreme headwaters. Before today I hadn't personally seen any there. It's hardly known as a fishery at all for that matter. Somewhat obscure, but not unknown.

There was only about an hour of daylight remaining when I parked near the water - and I had walleye on my mind. But I have taken pike here as well and thought I might find some this evening. Actually, with the temps in the upper twenties and barely any time before dark, I knew I'd be happy with anything. Heck, even just a chance to walk along icy waters under cobalt-blue Montana sky on a strangely windless winter evening was reward enough for the effort made to carve time from the day.

I headed straight to a spot I anticipated would produce some walleye action and worked the hole hard with light line and one of my long nine-and-half foot rods. I rotated through meaty jigs and various retrieves.

Nothing. 

Resigned to slow action, I started working my way along, picking apart little pieces of structure.

Still nothing.

I crossed in a shallow riffle and hiked a ways downstream to a long, slow, deeper hole where I've caught northern pike in trips past. I worked it till the sun was very gone. I stowed my rod in my waist pack and started hiking back upstream.

When I got to the riffle where I had crossed I couldn't bring myself to leave. So I continued upstream in the twilight covering water I had casted to earlier, but now from the opposite bank where I could reach it better. In a swifter run, one I hadn't really casted to all that much before when thinking of walleye, I picked up my first hit.

The hookset was into SOLID fish. The slow, muscular, bulldogish thrashing without-really-going-anywhere gave me visions of a big walleye. The broad red sides were a complete surprise. Disappointment of it not being a walleye wore off very quickly as I slipped my thumb and finger around the tail of the mature buck rainbow - a tail square and stout enough to grip like a baseball bat. I was in awe of the huge trout that I'd never even suspected was there.

After a quick couple photos and sending it back on its way I started working that seam more intently with a new focus. Within only the next cast or two I hooked into a second. Spunkier and smaller, it was no surprise this go-round to see the pink cheeks of another mature rainbow, this time a chunky hen.  I would have been equally in awe of this one if it hadn't been dwarfed by the first.  An owl landed on a spindly limb overhead and watched with what seemed like keen interest. When the show was over and the fish was swimming away, he flew off.

I could not help but continue to work that run to the head of the hole. I pushed the feathery ice out of my guides and resumed casting to the water that was becoming nearly impossible to see. I really wasn't set up to fish in the dark, but with fish like those I had to see if there were more. But they were the only two to strike. I had been fortunate enough to stick them both and land each of them for pictures. My fingers had been frozen earlier, but now, despite sliding my gloves off to handle the fish and rinsing my hands in the frigid water, I was thoroughly warm. And completely satisfied.

Once again, making sure to Always Travel With Fishing Gear had paid off. The key was being there and simply trying, with confidence and persistence. An unexpected trophy had been waiting in lonely winter waters. And like always, I now know more about a river than I did before.

The proof is in the.... meat bags.

I guess all posts can't be about fishing. Some just have to be for a good outdoors chuckle.
My 2015 hunting season wrapped up with one final adventure and a decent whitetail buck. It was a beautiful, cold, fabulously mountainous Montana day. Half a foot of frozen snow was on the ground. The predawn zero-degree landscape was fully moonlit.  My hunting bud and I saw six different moose that day and the deer kept the binos busy.

A pair of bull moose photographed through my scope

The temps barely made it to double digits. I'd passed on a lot of bucks as the season had progressed and was down to the final couple days to fill my tag or just start dreaming about big bucks in 2016. When this old warrior gave the opportunity at sunset I took it. I could see he was missing an entire tine on the right and later found that two others were broken. His burs were polished smooth. Must have been quite the fighter. And I can certainly attest that his manliness was persistent....

The meat bags had frozen after the pack out and were solid long before I got home. I just put them in the chest freezer to deal with later. I finished processing the meat after the new year holiday. Apparently when I washed the bags, some "proof of sex" was still tucked away in a fold somewhere and made it as far as the dryer, where it was discovered by my wife.  I was rolling! We both were honestly, although she maintained a "more disgusted than amused" front. And she's really enjoying giving me heck for it.  I suppose I'll need to wash those bags again....

2015 buck (photo by T. Copper)

A Return to Mattamuskeet

In my childhood years my family made all kinds of trips for all kinds of reasons.  During some of our sporting outings we discovered a special place located in the coastal swamps of North Carolina, more than 400 miles east of our home in the Smokies.  The earliest trips were ones where we camped in November to hunt, getting a jump on deer season by hitting a part of the state that opened earlier than the mountain region.  We'd also tow the boat along and fish some of the Carolinas' only natural lakes,

the miles of canals around them, and some coastal plain rivers like Pungo, Alligator, and Scuppernong.  Eventually those trips started including spring break trips where we'd go there purely to fish.  We caught big yellow perch in Lake Phelps and largemouth bass in and around Lake Mattamuskeet.  We'd also pick up slab crappie, white perch, bowfin, and the occasional gar.

By the time my brother and I were into high school traditional trips to Mattamuskeet had been established - spring fishing trips and fall hunting-fishing combo trips.  About the time I was done with college, the fall trips had become a permanent fixture.  They began to include an uncle and some cousins.  The biggest buck I ever took in North Carolina came on a trip down there, and I got to share the shot with both my dad and my uncle at the same time on a fluke chance that we all met up at once.  That was also my last trip.  After getting married and moving away, my participation in the fall tradition ceased.   A dozen or more years have passed.

late 1990s

My dad and uncle still go every year.  Sometimes my cousins join them.  The trip has gotten bigger.  It lasts longer and has grown to include salt water trips for redfish and trout.  In the time since I last went, my dad and his brother have turned grey.  My cousins have grown into men.  I have my own six- and seven-year-old children.  A man we met while staying in his sportmans' motel for spring fishing trips became a family friend.  Llamar Spencer hosts the trip every year in his little motel and allows hunting on some tracks of land.  He too is a grandfather a few times over now.  I realized one day that the trip, which I've taken for granted for the past decade, can't go on forever.  The time had come to suck it up, buy some airfare, shell out a huge chunk of coveted vacation hours, and fly with my own son from Montana to North Carolina and take part in the annual fall trip.

For the first time there were three generations hunting together where I was not the kid.  My son Cooper has been on small hunts with me in Montana.  Before this fall he'd seen one deer taken.  Now we've shared some experiences new to him that will make lifetime memories.  We swatted mosquitoes, watched deer up close, listened to great horned owls in the dusky dawn, slogged through the swamps, bounced across the waves - tasting sea spray as we chased redfish and watched dolphins.  It may be something that helps shape my son's perspective on the outdoors.  He really knows nothing outside of Montana when it comes to outdoor adventure.  Now he knows there's more, a whole other realm of outdoors unlike the world he lives in that is equally grand in its own ways.

We caught turtles and hermit crabs, hid in ground blinds, ate wild grapes, poked holes in the floating duckweed, and turned our motel kitchen into a full-blown meat processing facility.  We watched cotton fields get baled, peanuts harvested, and soybeans picked.  We hit a little marina cafe for some fried flounder, hush puppies, okra, and tea sweet enough to stand a straw in.  We hung out as six guys, ate like six guys, watched baseball playoffs like six guys, and mulled over hard decisions together - like whether to fish fresh or salt the next day, or whether to hunt.  Or maybe to both fish and hunt.  Tough stuff.

We all met up at the Hyde-Away (aptly named for those folks heading out on sporting getaways to Hyde County, NC) on a Thursday and settled in for the next ten days.  Even got in a little fishing before dark that evening.  The next day we walked the property we'd be hunting and set up ladder stands, hung chain-on stands, and built a few ground blinds.  Saturday was opening day, and that morning found my dad and my son sitting together in a pair of ladder stands set up side-by-side. It was my son's first experience in a tree stand and my dad's first experience hunting with his grandson.  As dawn broke over the swamps I was sitting a short distance away in a sweet gum, hidden by a tangle of vines, and listening to frogs and the general din of eastern woods that I hadn't heard in a long time.

My cousin Ryan connected with two deer that morning, and by evening they were butchered and in the chest freezer we'd brought along for the sole purpose of filling with game and fish fillets.  Over the next few days we took five more deer, all of us punching at least one tag.  It was a meat hunt, pure and simple.  Some good bucks were seen, but either beyond property boundaries or after shooting light.   Over the course of the week we also saw turkeys and four bears.

One morning I took a deer with my son practically in my lap.  Another evening I sat side-by-side with my uncle and shared in the moment with him as he took a deer, something we hadn't done in years.  Sometimes my son and I watched deer together with no intention of shooting them - aside from hoping a bigger buck would show up.  He observed whitetail habits and behaviors, listened to them splash through the swamp and flooded cornfield as they walked.  

The deer we did take was a little buck who stepped out into a grassy lane and walked within twelve yards of us.  My son was in my lap, trying to keep from shivering on the frosty morning.  I could do nothing but watch as it came from 50 or 60 yards and walked passed us before catching the movement of my son turning his head to watch it go by.  The deer bolted back to where it'd come from and stood broadside, trying to decide whether there was a threat or not.  I asked Cooper if he wanted me to take this one.  He  enthusiastically whispered "Yes!" and slid slowly off my legs behind our screen of brush.  The deer stood just long enough for me to settle the crosshairs and squeeze a shot, Cooper taking in the whole event.  It promptly ran off and few yards and sank in a canal.  I marked the spot and half an hour later it appeared on the surface.  We fished it out with a long stick as my uncle and cousin Sean linked arms and hung onto me while I leaned out over the canal to reach the deer. 

Hunting gave way to fishing as the weather warmed and the freezer filled to a level of venison everyone was satisfied with.  The wind diminished and two absolutely perfect days emerged in the forecast for some runs by boat out onto the bigger salt water.  We had two boats - my uncle's and my dad's.  We launched inland within a canal and ran out into various bays of Pamlico Sound.

My dad had dialed the water in over the previous dozen years, and we zoomed from spot to spot, catching fish upon arrival at nearly every place he had in mind.  We caught trout where he said there'd be trout, found redfish where he said we'd catch redfish, and picked up flounder along stretches he said would hold them.  There were points of land jutting from the marsh where both redfish and trout were stacked together.  We caught fish on various plastics, suspending plugs, walk-the-dog topwaters, and Glass Minnows (more on those and the fishing HERE).  We were fortunate enough to get into some hot trout action and to hook some brute redfish.  I got to scratch an itch that had been festering for more than ten years, and even took a big red on a topwater bait for icing on the cake.

In one afternoon my dad and I landed five redfish between 24 and 29 inches.  Cooper didn't seem to care too much about hooking fish on his own, but he fought several to the boat when we handed him a rod and got an absolute kick out of netting the ones my dad and I landed.  He loved to measure them to see if they were keepers and let them go if not.  He maintained the live well and its water quality.  But driving Grandaddy's boat was the highlight of each day....

One evening at the end of our trip I slipped out for a solo hunt.  Instead of taking a stand, I moved slowly through the flooded woods, checking field edges and glassing deep into the tangle, hoping to catch up with a buck my uncle had spotted earlier that was sticking to the woods.  While following a scrape line I came up on two bedded does that I watched at close range for a while before they figured out I was there.  Later I detected a larger animal moving my way that turned out to be a bear.  It got to about 35 yards, then found a carcass to gnaw on and spent the next 40 minutes crunching bones just a short distance away, never aware of me.  The swampy vegetation was just too dense to get a picture, and bear season wasn't yet open.

Our final morning found us loading up the pick-up trucks and boats like gear-laden gypsy wagons.  The trip was over - seven deer, a few hundred fish, and plenty of comradarie later.  Six Allisons.  Three generations.  Five of us hadn't been in the same room together since my cousins were toddlers.  Cooper was a new addition, and he'd heartily jumped in with both feet.  The trip was long overdue, yet also timed very well.  Throughout the days as my dad and uncle Ed reflected on previous trips, they realized they were having a hard time mentally separating one trip from another.  Memories ran together.  But I have a feeling this one will stand out in each of our minds and will be referred to fondly for years to come.

Kit's Tackle: Glass Minnows on Pamlico Sound

 

 

I had the opportunity this October to pack some Glass Minnows from Kit's Tackle on a plane east out of Helena, Montana and introduce them to some salt water fish in the Pamlico Sound between the Outer Banks and the North Carolina mainland. It had been nearly a dozen years since I'd targeted redfish and speckled trout. This trip was a long overdue adventure to join my dad on a blast-and-cast he and his brother Ed make every year. I was once regularly a part of it back when the tradition was being born more than 20 years ago. It also includes some freshwater fishing and whitetail deer hunting, but I was particularly excited to hit the salt.

We took fish on some standard plastics, some suspending plugs, and some walk-the-dog topwaters - but there was always at least one rod in the rack with a Glass Minnow attached. It won MVP of the trip hands down, responsible for taking the most fish and the widest variety of species. It also took my three biggest reds and my largest trout. It picked up some flounder. On days too windy to head out into the Sound it caught largemouth bass in the more sheltered freshwater.

We primarily fished the Rainbow and Jailbait patterns in quarter ounce and three eighths. Water depth was rarely over five feet and often as shallow as two. The retrieve was a standard jigging retrieve, but almost always making contact with bottom on the fall. Sometimes it was a more subtle swimming retrieve, or a 'hover' in current. Long casts to the marsh grasses, paralleling cutbanks, and perpendicularly across points were the rule.

My dad knew the water, having dialed it in during my absence over the previous decade or more. We hit the spots he knew would have trout, we hit the spots where he always sees reds, and we jumped to points of shoreline that seem to always produce. He pulled flounder off the sandy bottoms, we found reds over rougher ground -  such potholed stretches or oyster beds - and nailed the trout anywhere there was current and along steeper banks carved from the marsh clays by wave action.

Trout were the primary fish, and the Glass Minnow landed a couple hundred. Most were small - the bigger trout of fall hadn't moved into the Sound in numbers yet. We did boat a couple around the 20 inch mark. Most of the reds we caught were 14 to 18 inches, but we got up over 20 several times and nearly broke 30 inches with a few fish, the Glass Minnow taking three between 26 and 29.

 

The jigs took a beating, standing up to fish after fish.  Even when a bait had to be retired because the toothy trout had cut away nearly all the skirt and the hook shank had been reshaped a few times after being crushed by multiple reds, the painted heads showed little wear.  My dad was impressed and commented how they'd earned a permanent spot in his arsenal.

 

Tossing jigs was only a portion of this fantastic outdoor adventure that spanned ten days and three generations, seven deer in the freezer, old friends, revived memories, family kinship, and thousands of miles of travel.  But Jiggin' the Dream was brought to life in the Pamlico.