Special Places part 3

After getting the fly rod for my 13th birthday, my father took me out to our pond and showed me how to use it. After about 15 min of instruction my dad tied on a fly and told me to cast it out, of course it ended up in the bushes behind me. Either there was too many bushes behind me or I just could not cast the fly rod, I just felt clumsy with it.

My dad suggested we go to the other side of the pond where there were no bushes to get in the way of my backcast, now after about 1/2 hr of casting, I was doing it pretty good. Now once again I tried casting out into the lake, the fly went twenty feet out into the lake, I looked at my dad to see if he was frowning, as I looked at my dad and a slight tap was felt on the fly, the rod bent down and I was fast to a hand size bluegill. He pulled very hard or his size and after I swung him from the water and pounced on him with glee, I became a fly rod devotee.

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Special Places part 1

I was very lucky as a young man, my Dad loved to fish and hunt, and our family was always going fishing. My dad was in the army and we lived in many different places, we lived in Lawton Oklahoma, when I was 10 to 12 yrs old.

There were many places to fish on the Army Reservation, it had many small ponds or tanks as they were called there, and they were full of fish. Near our home there were many small creeks and a couple of small ponds. This was the first time in my life that my parents let me go fishing by myself ( though I had to go with someone for safety's sake as there were lots of snakes ).

My next door neighbor was a boy my age named Jimmy Tucker, and we spent many a day fishing a little creek about a block from my house for catfish and bluegill. One day while riding our bicycles we discovered a small farm pond, and by agreeing to cut the owners lawn twice a month, we got permission to fish in the pond. This pond was about five acres and totally full of fish, as the owners didn't fish much, and it very seldom got fished. We were in heaven! At first we just fished for the bluegills, shellcrackers, and asst. sunfish that were so abundant.

One day while reading a copy of my fathers Field and Stream magazine, I read an article on bass fishing, and it was talking about the hot new lures called plastic eels. The next day we went to a nearby tackle store and bought several packages. They came pre-rigged on a harness with three hooks, a couple of beads and a little spinner in front. It looked goofy, but BOYDID IT CATCH BASS! A whole new fishing experience opened up to us, a virgin lake chock full of bass, that had never seen a plastic eel before. We litterly caught fish till we got tired, NOT!!

Most of the bass we caught were 1/2 to 2 pounds, and most days we caught 50 to 75 fish, the onlyproblem we had was the three exposed hooks hung up so often we lost lots of them. We solved the problem by taking the eels off the harness and put a weedless hook in them, and putting a split shot in front we could cast right into the brush piles without getting hung up. Now that we could fish the brushy areas we started catching much larger fish, up to five lbs.

When I was twelve my father got transferred to Ft Benning Georgia, I was really unhappy that we had to move, and leave my little spot of heavenly fishing. Little did I know about the fishing bonanza I was about to become part of. If Oklahoma was heaven, Georgia was the seventh Heaven!
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