The Lake Where You Live

I can’t remember how old I was when I first caught a fish on an artificial bait. I don’t even remember the kind lure or the species of fish.

I am pretty sure I was older than my 11-year-old grandson Tucker, who caught his first fish on something other than live bait in early July on a visit to Birch Lake.

On a previous visit back in May Tucker wanted to try casting for pike, so I fixed him up with a skirted spinnerbait. I thought he’d be good for a couple dozen casts, 15 minutes at best, and then would beg to go back to a worm on a bobber.

I was wrong. We did a few long drifts on the pontoon boat, each casting a spinnerbait, and he kept at it for more than an hour without a single complaint, even though neither of us hooked anything except the occasional coontail plant. 

During the July visit he wanted to fish a lure again, so this time I fixed him up with a white plastic swim bait on a jighead. In the evening as we floated at anchor near a weed bed, while his mom and his nine-year-old brother Perrin fished with bobbers, Tucker kept casting.

A couple of times he asked how he would know when he got a bite. And I told him, “Believe me, you’ll know.”

And then, all of a sudden, Tucker was yelling. “I have something! I have something!” The rod bent as he excitedly turned the crank on his closed-face reel. I grabbed the landing net and went to his side. Soon a walleye of about 13 inches appeared at boatside; I scooped it up with the net, more for effect than of necessity.

I unhooked the fish; it flopped out of my hand and back into the lake before we could get a picture. But later in the evening he erupted in shouts again. This time, before I could deploy the net, Tucker had lifted his prize out of the water. “A northern pike! I caught a northern pike!” This time I held on to the fish, about a foot long, and displayed it in front of Tucker while his dad snapped a photo.

Now Tucker loves lures. When we visited his family a couple of weeks ago he asked me all about the lures I had bought him for his 11th birthday: a No. 5 gold-blade Mepps Aglia bucktail, a weedless plastic frog, a Whopper Plopper surface bait, and a Terminator spinnerbait with a chartreuse skirt.

“Could my Aglia catch a muskie?”

“How do I fish with the frog?”

“What will bite on the Whopper Plopper?”

He has taken a big step up in angling sophistication, far ahead of where I was at his age. Best and most important of all, he can’t wait to get back to Birch Lake and give all those lures a try. 

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting my website at https://thelakeguy.net.