With the change in the weather especially with the temperatures during the day getting into the eighties and with the trees and flowers along with the grass starting to wake up, I think some of us have spring time on our minds along with spring time activities.
For most this means fishing and for some of us it's also spring turkey hunting. I remember when I was young spring was my favorite time of the year, not only because of the fishing but it also ment the summer break from school was much closer. Fishing with my dad is one of my favorite childhood memories.
We made trips to the river almost every weekend if the weather would allow it, these were the trips I always enjoyed the most. We made trips to the gravel lakes in Bluff Springs several afternoons after we got home from school and dad got home from work.
These were my least favorite trips as a child of seven or eight years old, mainly because the fishing was a little harder in the lakes then in the river. He enjoyed these trips because he bass fished more than he bream fished at the time. He used a black or purple eight inch plastic worm most of the time and caught bass that ranged from five to eight pounds almost daily, the largest he caught out of the gravel lakes weighed twelve and a half pounds.
As I got older and my paticence got better and I learned to listen better as well, I began to catch fish and as time passed the gravel lakes actually became my favorite place to fish.
Soon I enjoyed fishing in the gravel lakes more than I did in the river. We often fished in other lakes, some you could only get to from the river and some you could drive to. One day we went to one lake and fished, we had a ten foot aluminum boat we fish out of.
We caught several bream and after the fishing slowed down in that lake dad decided we would load the boat into the back of his old Willys jeep station wagon, or as I refer to it now his first generation SUV and try another lake. We loaded the fish into the back of the jeep along with the boat and drove a couple of miles to a different lake.
We got to the other lake unloaded the boat and thought nothing of leaving the tailgate of the jeep open. We got out in the lake fishing, after a hour or so dad decided it was time to go home. We went to the landing and walked up to the jeep, suddenly as we got near the back of the jeep we heard a loud scream, out of the back of the jeep came a fair size bobcat, we figued he smelled the fish we had put in there and was looking for a quick meal.
To me one of the best things about the local area was the fact that you were never very far from a creek or in some cases a lake. A few of us lucky ones had a creek right in the neighborhood, and we would spend hours on it fishing. We usually didn't eat the fish we caught, there seem to be rumors of that the creeks all run through cow pastures, or next to some old outhouse.
We normally just put our catch in a bucket and after counting them we would dump the fish back in the creek. I believe our limit was the same back then as it is for some people today, all you can catch plus one. I never was able to figure out why the fish we caught right behind the house were not edible but if we went a little ways down the creek the fish there were fine for eating.
Along with spring comes one other event now that we didn't have back during my childhood and young adult days. This is the Alger Sullivan Historical Society's Sawmill Day, this year it will be May 5th at 610 Fourth Street in Century, it starts at 8 AM. The ASHS meets at 6 PM the 3th Tuesday of the month (March 20) at 610 Fourth Street in Century, please join us.
