About 6 or 7 weeks ago, my grandfather turned 90 years old, and we had a big family birthday to celebrate. There were over 35 extended family members there, and it was a great time. During the party, I spent some time talking fishing with grandpa, who doesn’t make it out on the water anymore, but still loves to hear my reports and stories.
Grandpa on his 90th with my 3 kids and a picture they “drew’ for him.
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A few weeks before his birthday, we had been talking about fishing, and he and my grandma were fondly recalling their days back in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s when they would load up their car with their 3 sons (my dad is the middle boy), go down to La Jolla and throw some bait out in the surf and catch all kinds of fish. They were fishing for dinner a lot of the time, and they said one of their favorite fish to eat was corbina. As it happens, this summer, my dad and I have had a lot of success catching corbina in the surf, and whenever I’ve had a particularly good day, I’d call grandpa and let him know about it, and it would always make him happy to hear.
The morning of the big 90th birthday celebration, I had been out really early with my dad fishing the surf at Torrey Pines. We were using spinning gear and throwing sand crabs, as the bite has been outrageously good all summer for corbina and yellow fin croaker. We were nearing the end of our session and getting ready to head home to get ready for the birthday party, and we were making the walk back to our car. I was scanning the skinny water and about 15 feet ahead of me, I saw a big wake torpedo out with the receding tide. I had a couple of crabs left in my pocket, so I put one on, and tossed it out, hoping for the best. While I’ve caught a lot of corbina this summer, almost none of them have been sight fished, so I didn’t have real high hopes for this one.
Suddenly, I felt some tension, but when I set the hook, it felt like a big pile of the ubiquitous seaweed that had been plaguing me all morning. I started to reel in, and then the “seaweed” gave a couple of shakes and took off on a drag-burning run. Fish on!
As fate would have it, my reel was severely malfunctioning, and the handle kept getting jammed so I couldn’t reel consistently. It was a hairy few minutes, but in the end, luck was on my side and I got to grab the biggest ‘bean I’ve ever caught.
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Just over 21 inches on the tape, and a blast to catch. Definitely an adrenaline rush! I can only imagine what it would be like to catch and land one of these brutes on the fly.
Later that afternoon, I pulled my phone out and showed my grandpa the fish and he got fired up at the sight of the big ‘bean. After several smiles, he jokingly gave me a hard time for not keeping it and bringing it home so he could filet it and cook it up or his birthday dinner. I can only hope that at 90 years old, I still have the capability and desire to handle a filet knife and make my own dinner.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I was doing some cleaning in my garage when I came across an old box mixed in with some of my fishing gear that’s been gathering dust. I opened the box, and in it were several old lures and plugs that my grandpa had given me about 20 years ago for Christmas. At the time, he told me they were some of his old tackle from when he used to fish as a boy. He had hung onto them for all this time and wanted me to have them, as I do the most fishing of any of his 9 grandkids.
The story he told me was that when he was a young boy (this would be back in the ‘30s and early ‘40s) his favorite uncle (whom I’m named after) would take him fishing and helped him learn how to catch a number of species of fish, both in the salt and fresh water. Over the years, he started doing more fishing on his own, and had accrued quite a collection of lures, poppers, and plugs. He couldn’t remember exactly which ones were his, but some of them were gifts from his uncle. When he gave me the box of lures for Christmas 20 years ago, he said all of them were between 40-80 years old. That would make them 60 to 100 years old today!
Last weekend, I was feeling nostalgic, so I decided to try and use some of the old baits to see if I could trick any bass up at the pond. Most of the lures were pretty banged up and rusted out, and I wasn’t sure they would work very well. Here was one of the better looking retrievers.
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I chucked it out (it was so heavy it flew about a country mile) and started bringing it back in. About ten feet from the rock I was standing on, a nice bass (~3lbs) shot up from the depths and slammed the lure. I had him on for a minute, but he came unbuttoned. The hooks were not in very great shape, so I guessed it would be difficult to connect and stay hooked up. I tried about 10 more casts, and managed a couple of hits, but unfortunately nothing was staying on. That, and the heavy grass kept fouling all of my retrieves. Convinced that the old lure would catch fish, I decided to move on to one of the old poppers from his collection.
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I tied it on my Jim Teeney 7wt and let it fly. For about 30 minutes, nothing was happening, but I did see a few bass come up and examine it on the surface. The closest to a strike came when I saw a huge bluegill come up and nose the popper, but it refused to hit it for real. I switched up and tried a couple of other flies for no luck, and then, as some clouds rolled in to cut the visibility, I switched back to the 50+ year old popper. 2nd cast and there was a violent explosion as my fly got sucked under. A solid fight on the fly rod and here was my prize.
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Not a monster, but a solid 2lber and a bit better than average for this little pond.
I stuck with it, and was rewarded with another a few minutes later. Kind of an awkward picture, but I was trying to get the popper in the picture.
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My dad came up and joined me and we ended up fishing well past dark. The old popper nailed a few more, including on my last cast, where I couldn’t actually see the plug. I just casted out, twitched it a few times, and listened for the explosion as it got slammed.
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It was a fun evening and using my grandpa’s (and my great-great uncle’s?) old gear really piqued my curiosity as to what else might be sitting abandoned in an old tackle box somewhere that I could recover and catch some fish with.
