(Please don't) Take me to your leader.

It's sometimes fun to ponder what Mozart, or others of his ilk, would think of the music of, say, Led Zeppelin or Muddy Waters, or even English Jonny and T.J. Brayshaw.  What I suspect, in at least two of these cases, is that he would at the very least recognize it as music.  He might even like it.

It's baffling to me, then, that folks who all might be lumped under the label of "fishermen" could have such different ideas about what fishing is, or at least ought to be.  Recently, in my internet travels, I came upon two different discussions that gave me pause for some reflection.  In most ways, they have very little in common, with the exception of two things.  First, both have something to do with fishing (If I'm feeling generous.  Let's just say, they have to do with fish.)  Second, my reaction to both was the same, which is to say immediate, visceral, and negative.  I thought about this afterwards, particularly about why my reaction was so negative and whether this was even fair.  In the end, I think I'm more confused than disturbed.

The first had to do with a well-known tarpon tournament that occurs each year in Florida's Boca Grande Pass.  Large numbers of very big tarpon pass through here, and absurdly large numbers of anglers gather to catch them.  This isn't the backcountry, flats fishing some of you might be familiar with, because here the water is too deep to fly fish (or even sight fish) for the tarpon.  Instead, the competitors jig the fish up from the depths.  The entire scene is borderline chaos, and many believe that the numbers of anglers, the fishing techniques, and the fish-handling practices are unnecessarily hard on the fish, such that mortality of these fish far exceeds what many tarpon anglers would consider acceptable.  It's hard to watch video of this event and not suspect the same.  A fellow on The Drake's message board was roped into fishing "The Pass" with his boss, and describes the episode this way: "Sure, we hooked fish, quite a few in fact. Got four to the boat, lost two of them to sharks. I don't know if they were particularly thick that day, but I'd say about a third of the poons met "Jaws" from what I could see. For the guys on my boat, that was particularly cool. We broke off a few times weaving in and out of the amateurs who "didn't know how to fish the pass" as my guide told them. I enjoyed a few of the "What the fuck are you doing?", "Move your fucking boat, don't you know what you're fuckin' doing?" that were exchanged between boats that are all of a few feet apart at times."

Hold your thoughts for a moment, please.

The second discussion came from a local fishing board, and had to do with a fellow's account of a large musky he accidentally snagged while fishing. He acknowledged that the fish was snagged (in the tail), and released the fish after landing it.  These things happen.  My immediate, visceral and negative reaction was to what followed his account of the event.  After describing the long fight, the fisherman described why he decided to go home, rather than continue to fish: "It doesn't get any better than this!!" 

It seems there was simply no improving upon this fishing experience.   In any event, he was then warmly congratulated by several other fishermen for a "Great catch!!", and several also congratulated him for releasing the tail-snagged musky.

This angler released the musky, and I suspect little harm was done.  I don't know the effects of the Boca Grande Pass tarpon tournament on those tarpon, but let's assume for the moment that it has little if any negative effects on the tarpon.  My gut reaction is to be deeply offended by the tarpon tournament on many levels, but perhaps this isn't fair.  The fact that it doesn't appeal to me doesn't necessarily mean that it's distasteful.  What has me so distressed is that I am at a complete loss to understand what is going on in the heads of any of these fishermen.  I am thoroughly confused as to why anybody would want to participate in that circus.

And the musky snagger? He can't imagine anything better than snagging a gamefish by the tail? Nothing?  Nothing at all? To try to get a fish to actually take a lure would be, I guess, anticlimactic. Hit a pheasant with your car while driving down the highway? The same as a great quartering-away wingshot, apparently.  Fucking a corpse?  "Best sex I can possibly imagine!!"

And what of those who congratulated him?  I was particularly bemused by those who congratulated him for releasing the snagged fish, as if he deserves extra accolades for doing what is so clearly the only proper option.  Jonny recently congratulated me on my ten-year wedding anniversary, but he never bothered to also congratulate me for not beating my wife or fucking the babysitter.

It makes me wonder if, despite that we all call ourselves "fisherman", we're even from the same planet.  My first thought, upon meeting some of these folks, might be to instruct them to "Take me to your leader", but I suspect even mastermind behind this colony of alien fishermen wouldn't be able to make me understand.

The Musky Man, part II

A few days ago, I put up a post about my grandfather and the large musky he caught years ago. If you have not yet read that one, I suggest you do, as it will put the following post in context. Here, my father, Grandpa's son, provides more details about the musky, and about the Musky Man.  Thanks, Dad.


Brayshaw, Sr. recounts...

Since T.J. had promised you that that I would soon add some details about the Great Fish and its catching, I will keep his promise for him. I loved his tribute to his Grandpa as much as most of the rest of you did, but since he wasn't living in that era when the events occurred, and I was, I'll try to truthfully embellish that event and also add some stuff that relates to other issues that T.J. mentioned.

First, about cussin' in general and specifically about cussin' in front of adults, women, girls and children. Dad (“Grandpa” to T.J.) enlisted in the Navy very shortly after that Date Which Will Live in Infamy and he was in the Navy until the end of the war. In later years when I came to know him better, I quickly learned that somewhere, sometime he had come to know and to practice “swearing like a drunken sailor”. During my entire life, I never saw him drunk, but he could swear like a sailor any time he needed to, and he frequently needed to. In further defense of his character, I will add that I have no memory of his ever having intentionally sworn in the presence of a woman or girl, and I have no memory of his ever having sworn at another human being. He wasn't even into calling people names, even if he was angry. Now I don't really know why he was so reserved about cussin' under such circumstances, but I have a theory. I think he just didn't need to, because he had such a personal and satisfying relationship with the tools of his trade and the tools of his hobbies.

When I was very young, the family bought a small farm with an old semi-modern farm house and a few unfenced acres on a narrow and very deep tract of land. The house needed better indoor plumbing and the land needed perimeter fencing to hold a little bit of livestock. Dad, being a plumber by trade and a true hardworking handy-man decided that he would tackle it all and do it himself. He had all of the tools and he had a personal relationship with all of them. Once I was grown enough to serve as an inept go-fer, I got to be around him a lot while he was working with his tool friends, and you should have heard how he talked to them. That's when I learned that an adult male didn't have to watch out for cussin' around young male offspring. If a tool that he was using didn't do its job exactly as it was created to perform the job, you could expect it to get cussed at, lividly. Wrenches, saws, chisels, hammers and nails and fence staples regularly were called by their first, middle and last names, and sometimes by their professions. I was surprised by how many tools were “filthy whores” and “ worthless son-of-a bitches” and “fucking assholes”. I kept my cussin' mouth shut for years. It would have been too hard to get a word in edgewise. But I learned.


In the late 1950s, when I was about 12 years old, my older cousin Ralph persuaded Dad and me to go fishing with him in Canada about 70 miles north of International Falls, MN, at the lower end of Lake of the Woods. We fished there for years almost each July, (the month following the closed season for taking muskies), but for some years, we clung to the smaller adjoining lakes because Lake of the Woods is one “big fucking place” (Dad's description) with thousands of islands that, to us, all looked the same, and we didn't want to get lost. Finally the lure of the bigger fish in that “big fucking place” got the better of us and we started fishing there with a professional guide. The guide pictured with Dad in one of the musky pictures, “John”, was one of the best. We fished with him or with his brother Mike for years, and they both learned that we were after BIG fish, not fish that we could catch oursselves, without his knowledge of when and how to find them, and still find our way back to camp.

One July, in a year that I had forgot, on a chilly, windy, bright morning, we boated up with John and he told us that we were in for a longer boat ride than we were used to because he was taking us to “Stoney” Bay, called Big Stone Bay by some. On the way into Stoney, John pointed out a small protected bay sheltered by a 50 yard long rocky peninsula, and in the back of the bay, along the shore, was a quaint little sandy beach about 20 yards wide. The water was about 15 feet deep ending up very shallow just off the beach. Cabbage weeds were growing submerged about 18” to 24'” below the surface. John told us that he and his brother more than once had moved a very big musky in the pool just off that beach, but the fish wouldn't take on bright days. He promised that we would stop on the way back if clouds moved in and the sun was lowering. We fished away the rest of the day, raised a few medium sized muskies, but we boated a lot of nice northerns.



Brayshaw Sr. on leftt, Guide John center, Grandpa at right

The sun was lowering and the clouds had moved in, and so we went after the Great Fish. As we always liked to do when fishing over submerged weeds, we tied on large musky-sized artificials that we could run either slightly below the surface or on top. If you've never met one of those “fucking Musky Hawks” (a fish-catching tool), let me describe one. The one Dad tied on was about 8-9 inches long, with a black bushy bucktail hiding a large treble hook and a lead weight, ahead of the bucktail was a band of red saddle hackles, and at the front was a large double spinner that moved a lot of water. To fish one of those things and to keep it on the surface, the instant it hit the water at the end of your cast, you had to sweep up the tip of the rod to keep the Hawk from sinking and you had to start reeling FAST to keep it on top. I was tossing a very large Mepps with a tan bucktail at the rear.

Musky Hawk, by the Marathon Bait Company


We started in deeper water and kept casting and raising Cain as John worked us closer to the beach. When we were about close enough to reach it, at the end of about an eighty foot cast, Dad's Hawk landed about 3 feet from the beach and he swept up his rod tip, and the spinning blade broke the surface, and started twirling and spattering water. At the same instant, there was a huge swirl in the water about 5 feet a way, the sign of a very large fish swapping ends. John yelled, “Don't take it away from him but don't slow down!” Within seconds we could see a trail in the water behind the Hawk that reminded me somewhat of the wake that a shallow running torpedo might make. The fish was closing, but by now the Hawk was only about 15 feet from the gunwale. Half that distance away from the boat, The Great Fish became visible just beneath the surface behind the Hawk, and she opened a mouth big enough to lose your hand in, swallowed the Hawk hole, and dived straight down under the boat. In an instant, she came out from under the boat and drove straight away, back in the direction of the beach. At a distance of about 20 feet, she came straight up out of the water and walked her entire length above the surface on her tail. Think for a moment of how long that short event might have lasted. Not very long. A shaking fish can't defy gravity for long. Well, no matter how long the instant might have lasted, during the instant, I was the only one to speak, and I had just enough time to say, “Jesus Fucking Christ!” So much for not cussin' in front of my Dad.




The fight lasted a little more than half an hour. It would have been longer had the Great Fish not swallowed the Musky Hawk all the way down into her gills. John said that in all of his years up there, it was the longest musky he had ever boated. Fifty-two inches, by the way. She was a recently spawned-out female that he said would have been well over 40 pounds within another week or two. That's how it happened, as if it were yesterday.
For years, the owners of the fishing resort where we stayed had a custom. Whenever one of their guests brought in a trophy musky, as a reminder to the guest of the date it happened, they gave the guest a new Canadian silver dollar, minted that year. I have that silver dollar. It all happened in July, 1966, just another yesterday 45 years ago.




[These two musky stories were merged into one, and published in a slightly different form in the Spring 2014 issue of "The Drake" magazine.  Thanks to Tom Bie and "The Drake" for putting it out there.]

The Musky Man

The Musky Man with The Great Fish

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I didn't catch the fish that is probably responsible for my infatuation with fishing.  In fact, I didn't even see it get caught.  Indeed, I hadn't even been born yet. But my fate was sealed, it seems, one summer day on Lake of the Woods, on the Minnesota/Canada border, back in the mid-1960s. The guide knew the big musky was there, but so far it had not been caught. Through what I now recognize must have involved at least some luck, the great fish inhaled my grandfather's big top-water Marathon Musky-Hawk spinner. Then, through what must have involved at least some skill, my grandfather landed this fish. Photos were taken at lunch on one of the rocky islands, and then again later at the dock.  Then he called my grandmother to let her know he was bringing this one back home, to hang on the wall.  "Like hell,", she replied, and so the great fish instead spent the next decade or so on Grandpa's office wall.  Up to this point, I had only seen photographs, but upon his retirement, the fish finally came home, where it found a spot...in the garage.

First photo: Guide in the shirt, Grandpa in the jacket

At the dock, with my father

Grandpa's routine was largely the same every day: he woke up very early every morning, hours before sunrise, and headed straight for the nearby golf course.  There, he fished the golf course ponds.  He had been a plumber by trade, and had been clever enough to work out a deal with the pro: Grandpa would do any routine plumbing tasks that the pro shop required, in exchange for nothing other than permission to fish the ponds. The pro agreed, provided that Grandpa didn't interfere with the golfers.  And so, his fishing routine was the same each morning.  He'd start at the pond closest to the first hole.  Shortly before sunrise, the first golfers would arrive.  He knew that from the time he first saw headlights in the parking lot, he would have 19 more minutes of fishing at this pond before he had to move to the next.  It didn't matter if the fishing was good - he had to move.  But several of the course ponds fished well, and by staying just ahead of the first party, he could fish all of the ponds in rotation, until finally he was forced to gather his gear and leave.  Then, home he went to clean his fish, change his clothes, and head back to the course...to golf.

I was fortunate enough to live close enough to my grandparents when I was a child that I could visit often, and when I did, my routine, too, did not vary.  I would greet Grandpa, give Grandma a kiss, and head straight for the garage.  There I would spend as much time as I could staring at the mounted musky, fantasizing about what it must have been like to catch that fish.  For my entire childhood, I was convinced that this fish was the baddest-ass of all bad-ass fish, and of course it only logically followed that one would have to be quite the bad-ass fisherman to catch the most bad-ass of all fishes. 

Grandpa, the Bad Ass (about age 16)

Grandpa and his pal, Louie, with a stringer of bass

And so, it was pretty exciting to me when I was finally old enough to go fishing with Grandpa.  (I had, by this time, already spent considerable time fishing with my father - no slouch himself - but of course, it was Grandpa who had caught The Great Fish.)  When I stayed with my grandparents, we almost always went to one of the local cafeterias the evening before for dinner.  I doubt I could stomach the food now, but I recall at the time being pretty excited about the fact that when I reached the end of the line, right there before the cash register, I was face-to-face with The Desserts.  The Desserts!!  So many choices!!  What to do!?  I always got a piece of cherry pie.

Early the next morning, Grandpa would wake me up early and we'd skip breakfast, get into his yellow Malibu, and head for the golf course.  It may be that my memory is hazy after 30 years, but I seem to recall some of the most fabulous largemouth bass fishing imaginable.  Given that there were several of these ponds, and we had them entirely to ourselves, the fishing may really have been as good as I remember it.  Then again, the fishing is always as good as we remember it, isn't it?

On one of these trips, when I was perhaps 8 years old, I caught my first big bass.  Unlike the spunky 10 to 12 inch one-pounders that were so common, this fish was 16 inches and weighed two-and-one-half pounds. I could not have been more proud. Of course, Grandpa typically caught one bass of seven to eight pounds each year, but he was bad-ass, so this was to be expected.  When he caught one of these big bass, he would take it home, clean it and eat it, and then hang the head on a nail on the back of the shed. Over the course of the next year, this big bass head would rot and dry, so that by the following spring, it would be almost unrecognizable.  Almost as if on cue, Grandpa would catch another big bass and replace the shriveled head with a fresh one.  I know, because I spent hours staring at these bass heads, too.

Young T.J. Brayshaw, with big bass

Grandpa, with bigger bass

When I was old enough to drive, Grandpa got me a summer job working at the golf course so that I could fish the ponds myself.  At about this time, I became serious about my bass fishing.  I read all the magazines, but most of all, I read B.A.S.S. magazine.  Unlike Grandpa, I approached my bass fishing scientifically.  I took water temperature measurements and learned all the latest ways to rig plastic worms.  I learned how to finesse a worm, slowly working it across the bottom, one finger touching the line so I could feel every move the worm made. I tried to explain all of this to Grandpa, but he refused to change his methods, which largely consisted of tossing out a pre-rigged plastic worm and reeling it back in. All I could do was watch him and shake my head. 

I never caught a bass of more than about four pounds from those ponds, while he continued to catch seven and eight pounders.  I now shudder to think of what an asshole I was.

My grandfather died of cancer when I was twenty. The last weeks were tough because the pain medications he was taking sometimes made him hallucinate.  Sometimes during conversations, he would suddenly begin yelling at me for spilling all over the place something that, because of the drugs, only he could see.  But on their 50th wedding anniversary, he instructed my grandmother, who was taking care of him during these last days, not to give him any pain meds.  As a result, he was completely lucid that day, and while he must have been in great pain, it never showed. The entire family spent the day together, celebrating their half-century marriage, and we all spent some time speaking with him alone. When he and I spoke, we didn't talk about how he was going to beat the cancer, because it was clear this wasn't going to happen.  Because I was in college, and would be going back to school soon, we both knew that this was likely to be our last conversation, and indeed it was.  He told me then that one thing he truly regretted was that he and I never got a chance to go musky fishing in Canada.

While I remember this conversation like it was yesterday, one of my most vivid memories of my grandfather was from one of those early fishing trips to the golf course, over ten years before his death and now, it occurs to me, over thirty years ago.  He was trying to change lures, but was having trouble threading the fishing line through the small ring on the lure.  He called me over and asked me if I would do it for him.  "Here," he said. "You do this.  You've got young eyes.  They make these rings so God-damned small nowadays."

I swelled with pride, partly because he clearly trusted me enough to have me tie his knot for him, but also because he swore in front of me.  I was afraid I might get in trouble if I swore in front of any adults, but I recall many times, after that, when I was alone fishing, mumbling under my breath every time I tied on a new lure "They make these rings so God-damned small nowadays."  I practiced this so often, surely I must have sounded just like him.

Grandpa, in hat, my father (shirtless) and childhood friend fishing in Canada, late 1950s

[These two musky stories were merged into one, and published in a slightly different form in the Spring 2014 issue of "The Drake" magazine.  Thanks to Tom Bie and "The Drake" for putting it out there.]

Presentation

There are pioneers in New England and beyond who take the presentation of their baits to an artful level. Alas, it's a rare thing to capture that single moment when real innovation is born, so I'm delighted to receive this astonishing example from Young Pete, himself quite adept with Ohioan Steel, I hear.



Hook: Really big
Thread: String
Body: A Chicken
Tail: No
Wing: A Chicken's
Legs: Chicken



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