A Pop Angler's Guide To Fishing With Coffeepots And Other Original Lures

I have always considered myself a fisherman. This morning, for example, I have been out chumming black-nosed dace into a seine and have already caught 162 of them, more than a day's supply for our household raccoons, shrews and fish crow. It is true that these are not very large fish—trophy dace run about 4� inches—but they are ever so game. A big bull dace will muscle his way right between the interstices of mesh if you don't get the net out of the water smartly.

Catches like this, which I have been making for many years, have led me to believe that I am a fisherman, yet I admit that for a long time I seem to have been drifting farther and farther out of the angling mainstream. I have fished and I have caught fish, but I have been sneered at by other fishermen because I do not fish for the right things at the right time in the right way. In fact, if you go to many of my fishing friends they will tell you flatly, patronizingly, "Bil does not fish." Until recently I never contradicted them, realizing that according to their high artistic standards—a black curmudgeon hackle is used only between 7:30 and 9 a.m. on eastward-flowing streams—I did not fish. Recently, however, I have ceased to be shy and sensitive about my fishing. Good, approved-of High Fishing, as I understand it, means catching fish in sporty ways. This being the case, I now see myself as having gone so far out that I am in. After all these defensive years I am now holding my head up proudly as an avant-garde angler, an innovator of style and technique. As Dick Tracy is now to serious art, I am to fishing—the first of the Pop Anglers. No longer do I feel it necessary to hide my fishing experiences. Rather, it seems to me that, for the betterment of the whole sport, I must make my position known.

I started fishing 35 years ago in a shallow, reedy Michigan lake, on the shore of which I more or less grew up. In those days and in that place the conventional way to fish was to anchor a rowboat, throw out a line tied to a long cane pole, sit back and wait for a fish, whose presence would be indicated by the agitation of a red cork bobber. The object of a morning spent in this fashion was to catch a dozen or so bluegills, maybe a bass or pickerel, to eat for supper.

Even in those days I was made restless by the academic restrictions of the Fishing Establishment. So restless was I that most older, more serious fishermen would not take me in their rowboats. This did not fill my childhood with the bitter wine of frustration but rather with relief. I did not really enjoy sitting on a hard seat staring at a piece of cork as intently as a mystic at a point of flame.

However, our family had a mania for competition, and thus it was that among other curious contests we always held a Fourth of July fishing tournament. The rules were simple: two people fished together as a team, their score being computed on the basis of total inches caught, but the play was fierce. (It marks a child to find his great-grandfather trying to stretch another inch out of a bluegill with two pairs of pliers.) Because feeling ran so high, I had no chance of being chosen as a fishing partner, and I never was. But regardless of what the family record book shows, my partner and I won the 1938 fishing contest, and in so doing I for the first time suffered the unreasoning barbs of angling's purists.

My partner was a large, shaggy Airedale named Mike. Like myself, Mike was a pariah among polite anglers. Hour after hour, summer after summer, he would gallop through the shallow offshore waters trying to catch carp, bullheads, frogs and turtles. If a line, a bobber or even a boat got in his way, he simply ran over the obstacle. He was a happy, dedicated fisherman, though he never caught much working alone, and neither did I. But together we were effective. Our favorite spot was not the lake at all but a small, narrow, bush-draped outlet creek. Though beneath contempt as far as serious fishermen were concerned, this little stream teemed with aquatic game. Mike and I went there mostly for turtles and mud puppies, species which we both found more interesting than mere fish. Our method was for Mike to tromp through the stream, barking wildly to flush out the creatures, which I would then grab.

On July 4th, 1938, Mike and I, both unselected—to put it kindly—for the fishing contest, took ourselves off to this creek. I had a large butterfly net and Mike his unquenchable enthusiasm for pursuing water varmints. We went to a place where the creek was partially blocked by the roots of a large pin oak. I put the butterfly net across this narrow chute, and Mike began moving downstream toward me, floundering, thrashing, diving in the muck. In an hour or so we had netted, among other things, four goodish largemouth bass, two carp and a bowfin, a large prehistoric-looking type which, so help me, is called in southern Michigan a dogfish.

Though our total inches were twice those of the nearest competitor—the carp alone almost was enough to win—our record was disallowed. "It doesn't count. They didn't catch them," stormed the traditionalists. So here was the beef that has plagued me through the years. To say that Mike and I had not caught anything, or that what we had caught were not fish, was plainly at odds with evidence. We looked like we had fish, and we smelled like we had fish. But fishermen are like thought police—two and two are five. We had not caught fish because we had not caught fish as other fishermen had tried to catch them. The rules committee agreed that the seven carcasses we submitted were nonfish and stuck to their decision even after thay had eaten our four bass.

As time passed and I got out of the southern Michigan provinces, I met more worldly fishermen—those with old, frail-looking poles, delicate, expensive reels, hats stuck full of okapi-skin lures. Such people, I found, regarded fishing with a bobber and cane pole as scornfully as my family did fishing with an Airedale. Yet even these sophisticates were not sufficiently advanced to understand and admire my style.

One such high fisherman was a newspaper editor. He and I were fairly close acquaintances, but he stopped speaking to me in August 1952 after hearing an account of one of my most successful fishing trips. This chap, whom we shall call Dryden Flye, had been away to a fancy school where, among other things, he had learned about trout and when to whisper reverently, "The hatch is on." (One is not born with a taste for High Fishing. It is an acquired habit like wearing velvet collars, drinking martinis on the rocks and reading T. S. Eliot.)