Got it on a farm pond....

I'm back. Yes friends and neighbors I have returned safe and sound and will try in the next few lines to pass on some of the really nice things about farm living. The first thing is that most farms have at least one pond. Ponds are nice, they provide drinking water for horses, cattle and every other creature that drinks water from other than a tap. They provide a source of moisture for plants, they are a food source for ducks, muskrats and cranes. AND they have fish. In the case of my brother's farm pond, big fish! The one at the left was almost full grown, at over 5 lbs. I caught over twenty fish, on anything that I tied on in two evenings of fishing. It was good for the soul as well as my ego. I fish mostly on Tablerock lake, I catch lots of fish there, but not like the old farm pond fishing,

Growing up and running the farms of Texas County in the summer I learned to fish on farm ponds. My brother Barry, a country companion named Leroy and I would become the absolute terrors of every farm pond we had permission to fish. From the time we were told we were going to "Grandma's" Barry and I would plan, discuss strategy and map out how we would sneak up on each pond. One of the finer points of farm pond fishing, learned from the old pond fisherman Leroy, was you could not just walk up to a pond, you had to sneak. We would approach a pond in the same manner a police SWAT team would take down a suspect. Slowly on hands and knees, peeking over the dam until all of the water was mentally cataloged. Then slowly, with baited hook, stand until you could cast. Then quick as a flash, line tossed over the waters with the slightest splash as the bobber sat down on the surface. Then WAM, the bobber goes down, the hook is set and the fight is on.

Miles would be walked dragging tackle boxes and sometimes the biggest stringer of bluegill and "line-side bass" you ever saw. At days end the fish would be cleaned, scaled, and the heads and tails would be removed. The fish would be dropped into the frying pan. My Grandma Holder would cook anything her grandsons carried home from squirrels to frogs to small perch. She was great. Granny made no complaints and we all ate with satisfied smiles of grandeur.

I use a lot of things other than " little green grasshoppers" for bait today. On my recent trip I caught fish on poppers, buzz-baits, plastic worms and spinner-baits. With every cast a memory of a by-gone catch on one of the many small ponds we fished as a kid would surface. It has been said you can never go back, poppy-cock, you might not get younger, but with farm pond fishing you always get a do over.