My Home Water

[Feathers and Fins]

I saw Phill's poll and it reminded me of where i grew up and thought I would share it with you all.

It was a magical place a beautiful place, yet at the same time a scary place. The morning fog some days was only 10 feet you can walk a levee and look across it like a medieval battle scene; it even smelled like death with the decomposing earth around. But this place produced vast amounts of game to pursue and fish to catch.

Nighttime temperatures often dipped to freeze and daytime highs could be in over One Hundred degree’s. This place to me was home though. The morning sun was unbelievable to those who have never seen it dancing across not only the sky and the bottom of the clouds but the water. The mountains surrounding it would catch its early rays and the different ore in it would show many colors as if someone was painting them as you just sat and watched. Greens, yellows, oranges, blues and purples as if all colors of the rainbow did not want to be left out of the scene.

Fish were jumping and boiling on baitfish all around. Small shore birds darting in every direction quail calling in the distant sage and mesquite. It was often hard to concentrate on the ducks that were coming in at you like guided missiles. Pintail were so thick some days you could have used a butterfly net it seemed to get them. Teal flew so close and so hard I actually had my hat nicked by more than one. The Canada and snow geese could always be heard but were difficult to hunt.

The area was certainly not for the novice to hunt it could take your life. There were many perils to this area from sink holes that only a trained eye could see underwater there were old tractors cars and building parts, worse of all old farm equipment that barnacles made sharper then when they were new, they could cut you to ribbons in a brush of the skin. Deep drop offs were another problem for any who dared to wade this area.

Your gun and gear was in just as equal a danger as your body, Salt weed and salt water would quickly rust anything metal and the muck could jam even a single shot shotgun. Nothing was safe or protected.

Yet every year countless people braved the area, they did it for the sheer number of waterfowl that could be found here. Now growing up with a club in this area I was afforded the luxury of watching my elders and learning from them when we chose to go out of the pits and jump shoot the open areas where those less fortunate hunted. We knew the area and were able to walk areas where others dared not because of the dangers.

As I grew to a man I enjoyed the freelance much more than sitting in the pits and often was found wading the areas. I will never forget people stopping me and telling me how dangerous it was and then watching me casually walk out to a point a half mile from shore never getting more than knee deep in the water. They seemed amazed as they had tried getting there just to be turned around by waist deep muck. To me there was no danger but this was from being shown a old submerged road bed by my uncles when I was younger. It zigged and zagged and you had to know its path or be over your head quickly or stuck in the muck.

The mornings always started off the same, the old men were up first making coffee and a breakfast of bacon and eggs. They would wake the rest of us up one by one and we would take a shower to rinse off the sweat from the night’s sleep and wake ourselves up. It only took about a half hour just perfect time for breakfast to be finished. Everyone regardless of hunting the club or going out on the big water or freelancing the out of club area always sat down for breakfast together. It was a tradition that all family and friends be there and none would dare disrespect that.

We hunted the early morning for waterfowl usually done shooting by Eight A.M. we would return to the clubhouse and clean the mornings game. We traded in our duck guns for smaller light weight more manageable light guns to chase the quail we had been hearing all morning. We did this till noon when we returned to the clubhouse where by then the old men had cooked a lunch of duck fit for kings from the mornings shoot.

We would sit around laughing and eating this bounty with our friends and family. No matter how hot or cold it may have been a quick step in the clubhouse after lunch would find many of us sleeping on the floor belly’s full and very content.

The old men were always playing pea knuckle or poker while we slept with all eyes on the barometer for if it started to fall we would all be woken as if a fire was in the clubhouse. They knew if it fell the Corvina would be biting and when it did fall, it was like a firehouse alarm bell going off. All men man the boats as we would launch them to chase those powerful delicious fish.

Trolling thin fins and rapalas or going to the drainage canals to catch the small perch and tilapia that inhabited them were part of being there. Corvina big powerful and hard fighting with a nasty tooth to go with the rest of their power was all part of the allure of the fish.

One hundred fish per day was not uncommon if you were going after crocker, sargo and tilapia. a few pile worms or red worm and you could have a day of your life.

In the evenings it was all about eating freshly BBQ’ed steak and corn on the cob we picked while hunting quail. After dinner we would walk to the North pond only but a few steps from the tables we were eating at and toss our lines in the pond for some of the catfish that swam the water, or get in the old row boat and chase the big bass in it.

This was truly a dream place for a young man to grow up around family and friends. A place where you became a man in many ways! I think about this place often and usually end up picking up the phone to call one of the other boys I grew up with. At Forty Years old we are still best of friends from the relationships we made back then. Where so many people have friends for but a few years, we are still friends after over Thirty Years. It was that place and those times that built relationships that last forever.

It was that simple place on the North Shore of the Great Salton Sea that memories that will last a life time were made. I thought I might share it with those of you who may never get to visit her.

[Daryk Campbell Sr]

You paint a beautiful picture. Thank you for sharing the experience.

[Al Agnew]

Nice piece of writing!

Home waters...

The river was a mile from my house growing up, and I spent half the summers and any free time I had in the spring riding my bike that mile to fish. In the fall, I did the same thing, but with a .22 strapped to my back, going squirrel hunting along the bluff below where I parked the bike. I'd leave the house, take the back streets to the old highway, coast down the long hill to the bridge, park the bike under the bridge and clamber down the high bank to the river. Sometimes instead of going all the way to the bridge I'd turn off onto a side road, wind my way down to the bridge on the tributary creek and past it to park along the side of the road, hiding my bike in the brush. From there I'd wade down the creek catching crawdads, and when I got to the river a quarter mile downstream I'd have enough crawdads for a few hours of fishing in the long pool that ended at the creek. That pool was my true "home waters". I fished it more than anyplace else along the river. It was about 400 yards long and fairly deep from bank to bank, deep enough that you really had to know exactly where to wade to keep from going up to your neck (or over my cheap plastic waders when I'd fish it in the early spring). It had tree-lined alluvial banks on both sides and numerous logs and rootwads that held fish. The upper end was the absolute perfect spot to fish with crawdads, with a big slick log that always had smallies stacked up under it, where the current would take your crawdad right under the log and into their mouths.

But as I got a little older, my dad built me an inner tube boat, two truck tubes strapped to a sheet of marine plywood, with a hole cut to line up with the hole in the front tube. You sat on the plywood with your feet dangling in the water, and kicked yourself around with swim fins. I'd talk my parents into hauling me and the craft to the river and picking me up, and my "home waters" became a five mile stretch of river from an old low water bridge down to the highway bridge, or on down to the tributary, where I'd drag the inner tube boat up the creek to where they were waiting.

That five mile stretch of Big River is still one of my favorite places to float, all these many years later. In the nearly fifty years that have passed since I first took the inner tube boat down it, I've probably floated it 300 times or more. I can close my eyes and picture every pool, every riffle, and every place where I've caught a big bass over the years. I can also see the changes in it...

Perhaps later I'll describe it, and those changes.

[Feathers and Fins]

Thankl you gentlemen it was a truly great place, Al, what was this name of the place you are talking about.

And like your place the Salton Sea unfortunately has changed for the wourse from what ive read. Its a shame.

[Al Agnew]

Big River...the most abused stream in the Ozarks. My home five miles mostly included a big horseshoe bend, only a half mile across the neck of the bend but about four miles around it. Much of the inside of that bend was covered in old lead mine waste. It was like two different rivers, depending upon which bank you looked at. As you traveled downstream, there were many places on the right bank where slopes of "chat", the crushed rock left after the lead ore was removed, were in view, but on the left bank it was all "wild" wooded bluffs. The mine waste continually eroding into the river was the reason why it was shallow and fairly easy to wade, although you'd often encounter sandy mine waste areas that were so soft-bottomed that you'd sink halfway up your lower legs with each step.

And yet there were many places along it where you didn't see the mine waste, and the water looked good and the fish were there. They still are, although the spotted bass have moved in and the smallmouth population is declining.

[Feathers and Fins]

Sounds like both our home waters suffered fates they did not diserve.

[eric1978]

My old slice of heaven on the upper Huzzah. Pie-shaped 100 acres bordered on one side by the river and the other two sides by MT National Forest. Small water, and generally small fish, but enough 15-16 inchers to keep things fun, and occasionally a bigger one. An average day: get out of bed, have a cup of coffee, and make my way down the bluff to the river as soon as there was enough light to do so. I spent my summers wading up and down from the house. Unfortunately we had to sell the place a few years ago, so it's someone else's baby now, but it'll always be mine in my mind. My dad built the house with his own hands. I sure miss that place.