Kerplunk

Kerplunk! The first advice I ever received about fishing was passed on by a teenage ranch hand when I was six years old. As often happened in those days, a spontaneous card party had erupted at the main ranch house one Sunday afternoon, and it was decided by the rancher that everyone should stay for dinner that evening. The fact that the ranch larder had little on hand to feed twenty or so people bothered the rancher not at all. He simply turned to one of the older boys and ordered, "Biff, go catch us some fish for supper." To my mind, this was about the same as ordering up a miracle: "Biff, go to the moon and back before supper." My own father, a member of the card party, probably reacted to the order about the same as I did. Dad didn't put on any airs that he was some kind of sportsman, but catching a fish for him was about equal in difficulty to working out the mathematics for Einstein's theory of relativity. (I inherited my father's genes for both mathematics and fishing.) Although Biff didn't seem particularly pleased with this assignment, he turned to me and said, "C'mon, Pat, I'll show you how to catch fish." It must have been in the spring of the year, March or April, because I recall great, greasy masses of frog eggs in pools of water scattered about the meadow through which the creek meandered. I never did see the actual creek, because it was bordered on both sides by brush considerably higher than Biff's head. The fish-catching apparatus apparently was well established at the ranch. Biff stopped by one of the barns and scooped large handfuls of worms out of a box of soil. He put the worms in a rusty can and the can in an old milk bucket. Then we headed out into the watery meadow. Biff hadn't bothered with a fishing rod, and I soon discovered why. Leaning up against the brush along the creek every ten yards or so was a slender, peeled tamarack pole. Each was about ten feet long. A line ran from the tip to the butt. A heavy lead sinker was attached to the line. A sturdy leader ran from the line to the hook. The hook was neatly tucked into the butt of the pole. (Please note that I do not dignify these contraptions by referring to them as "rods.") Biff undid a hook and placed a bit of worm on it. He then whipped the pole around in a rather graceful arc and sent hook, line, and sinker flying over the brush. (This action was much more difficult to accomplish than it seemed, as I was shortly to find out.) It was then that I received my first bit of fishing advice. "Always listen for the kerplunk," Biff said. "The kerplunk?" I said. "Yeah," he said. "Kerplunkis the sound your sinker makes hitting the water. If you don't hear the kerplunk, your hook may be sitting on a log or hung up on the brush. Your line's not even in the water." I have remembered that bit of fishing advice all my life and follow it even to this day whenever I am in a situation that requires me to hurl a baited hook over a wall of brush. Indeed, it is good advice for everyday life: Always listen for the kerplunk. Otherwise, your line may not even be in the water. As I recall, the catching of the fish that day was rather tedious and miserable, the weather being wet and cold. Biff baited the hook on each pole, and then whipped the line over the brush. We then walked back to the beginning of the row of poles -- I think there were eight or ten of them -- and, reversing his maneuver of sending the line out over the brush, he brought it back, with a fish looping through the air and plopping on the ground behind us. Most of the trout we caught seemed to run to the small side, about eight inches or so. (Good, though!) Biff dropped each in the bucket as he caught it. Within an hour and a half we had in the bucket what in those days was described quite accurately as "one heck of a mess of fish." Still, I doubt we were over our combined limit, because the limitMcManus, Patrick F. is the author of 'Kerplunk ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743280495 and ISBN 0743280490.