My dad taught me just about everything I ever needed to know about fishing, from starting me early with a riverbank sapling and length of fishing line to teaching me the finesse of handling his classic bamboo fly rod. Under Dad’s diligent tutelage I grew up an avid fisherman.
But I never learned to love winter fishing. No matter how often Dad hauled me to the lake in freezing weather, I never learned to do more than dutifully endure it.
Of coursed, I never outright complained or refused to go. Dad was determined to teach me how to catch fish in winter, and by thunder I would have a good time no matter how boring or miserable it made it. He never actually said that; but, he didn’t have to. He was Dad.
Winter fishing in those days (the 1960s) fell into two categories – heated docks and unheated lakes.
The heated dock experience took us to Bob Brown’s place on the Niangua arm of the Lake of the Ozarks. More than a conventional boat dock, the fishing dock was a small, heated building floating just offshore in a narrow cove. Inside a large room was a proportionately large hole in the floor, with a low wall preventing anglers from falling in.
It was not uncomfortable, but neither was it like any sort of fishing I was used to. As far as I could tell from stories in Sports Afield, it was as near as the Ozarks could come to ice fishing on northern states’ lakes. But, rather than one or two guys in a small hut, a dozen or more could simultaneously drop baited lines over a small wall and hope to catch crappie or any other unfortunate quarry lured to the light.
The times I went with Dad – always at night – I never even got a bite. I do recall a couple of times Dad and his buddy, George, came home with what looked like bushels of fish – white bass, I think. I remember because they rousted us out of bed well after midnight to witness their haul. I was never party to such success.
What I remember of the heated dock is somber fishermen holding crappie poles out over that watery, black abyss, the air filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of fish and the muttering of men assuring one another, “It ain’t always this slow.”
Nearer home and in more familiar waters were Dad’s trips to McDaniel Lake just north of Springfield. It was there on many winter days certain regulars and first-timers lined the walls of the old concrete bridge crossing near the center of the lake. The bridge is now closed to traffic, but 60 years ago is was a well-traveled county thoroughfare.
At various points the hardy anglers stopped to drop baited lines or crappie jigs into the Springfield city drinking waters of the impounded Sac River. The quarry, as in other winter fishing holes, were crappie, and the resultant catch silvery panfish seldom bigger than the palm of a fifth grader’s hand. It took a bunch to make a meal.
Many a fishing pole must have been lost, I’m sure, by hapless anglers who lay them unsecured on the top of the concrete wall, unaware that the slightest tug on a minnow could send rod, reel and all plunging to the bottom of the lake.
Dad and I were never so careless, grasping our rods firmly as we leaned over the ice-cold concrete wall. Winter fishing for crappie was nothing like angling for perch in July. The slightest tug might be a bite, making the most sensitive of fishing rods important, and nigh-frozen fingers almost useless.
I confess, I never had the patience or the touch for catching crappie in winter, and I really hated plunging my hand in an icy minnow bucket every time I baited a barren hook. Cold and bored, but ever-dutiful, best described me on winter fishing trips to McDaniel Lake.
Though I learned to love fishing, when I was older and could have driven myself to McDaniel Lake in January, I never found it convenient.
Despite that, if I had the chance to take every trip with my long-departed Dad all over again – spring, winter, summer or fall – I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Lessons that once seemed cold now gleam like diamonds.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
