Tomorrow Finally Marks The Opening Of Fishing Season
"The Penalty Box"
Posted
Roger Grossman-
Tomorrow is a day I have been looking forward to since the final buzzer sounded in the 4A state basketball championship game last month. Tomorrow is the day that signals spring finally is here. Tomorrow…is when I start cleaning up the boat and getting it ready to go fishing. Between last October and today, the 16-foot V-bottom aluminum fishing vessel in my garage has become a mini-storage facility. It has become a temporary home for my leaf blower (which can also be used for blowing snow around when needed), for my ice fishing gear, for hand tools that got used for projects during the winter, and anything else that impedes the path of any human from moving from the house to the driveway. It’s aluminum, but it is a magnet for…stuff. So tomorrow we will plow through the checklist of things that have to be done before we put her in the water for the first time, hopefully soon. I’ll be vacuuming out the bottom of the boat, checking the carpet remnants I lined the boat with for hooks, lead weights, lures and anything else that shouldn’t be there, tying on new towels and hooking the boat up to the truck to make sure the lights are working. And the whole time that’s happening, I’ll be day-dreaming of watching my bobber slip under the water and leaning back in my chair to lift the end of the pole—followed by that split second when everything in the world goes silent as you wait to see if there really is anything on the other end of your line. It’ll make the work go faster tomorrow. It will also be a day of reflection. My dad taught me to fish, but more than that he planted in me the love of fishing. Notice how I said that: “the love of fishing.” Not a love of catching fish, a love of fishing. My dad loved to go fishing. He loved to be in the boat. He loved to talk in the boat—serious talk. The talks a dad and his young son should have. The kind of talks you want to have when the only distractions are putting worms on a hook and a disappearing bobber. As much as he wanted to catch fish while he was fishing, he taught me it was so much more important just to “be” fishing. I asked my dad about that once. I said to him “Why do you say you had a good day fishing even when we didn’t catch any fish today?” His reply? “Because we spent the day together fishing”. And he left it at that. He learned that from his dad, who learned it from his dad. He passed that on to me. I will try to pass that on to my son. We are probably still 6 weeks or more from having that perfect day: sun setting on a 75-degree day with little or no wind, a basket full of fish—or none at all. Four Grossmans in the boat. Four bobbers half-soaking in the fading daylight. It will take about two hours to clean and check and organize tomorrow, and it will be worth every second.
