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| Tracy Bunning, 1966 |
I’ve discovered a new piece of hardware that really speeds up my fly-lures hook-up. It’s a small clip called a fas-snap. You tie it to the end of your line and then you don’t need to tie a knot each time you change flies or lures and you don’t have an unnatural snap swivel hanging down. It comes in three sizes and the smallest will work with dry flies. Anyway, with my new fas-snap, I was able to get rigged before Cole and after hooking on a perch pattern streamer fly about 2 ½ inches long, I slid down the bank and got ready to cast. The river is running a little high and murky, but not too bad. With 10 degree nights the run-off really slows down by daylight. I got out on some boulders near the shore and made my first cast. I had retrieved about 20 feet of a 30 foot cast when I hooked up, first cast, first fish of the first trip of the season. It doesn’t get any better than that! When I got the fish close enough I saw that it was a 17-18” rainbow. Cole went for the camera and when he tried to get a shot to go with this story he discovered that the camera batteries were dead. Yeah…I know, tell you another one, right? Well, in this case Cole’s abilities with technology paid off. He got a couple of pictures with his cell phone and then transferred them to the computer, so with some luck we may be able to include a picture with this offering.
You know that catching a fish on your first cast of the day many times is the kiss of death, right? We fished for almost three hours and moved up the river several times and finished up behind JJ’s restaurant and I only caught one more, a brown, all of 6” long! Oh well, its not the numbers, it’s the experience. The geese were flying up and down the river and we had the river to ourselves until the very end. Oh, Cole, don’t forget to tell them about the fish you caught when you write about this trip. Speaking of Cole’s article, I haven’t seen much from the rest of you either. Lets get with the program!!! Uncle Mike sent me a couple of articles he found online about Winous Point. Thanks Mike!..These guys thought I was telling a tall tale, but you sent them to everyone so I won’t include them with my article for April.
On 3/28/09 I saw something I’ve never seen. Mom was watching our pair of geese on the pond and said, “look, they’re diving”. Thinking she meant tipping up while they fed, which we’ve all seen them do, I went to look and she was 100% right. They were diving completely underwater. Just shows to go you…you can always learn something new.
4/7/09, sent in elk and deer applications. Mom and I put in for elk in the private land season, first week in Sept. to Jan. 15th; also 3rd season gun deer.
Part 3: Winous Point
Clayton, when you suggested we start up this exchange of hunting and fishing stories, you mention that traditions were a big part of your memories and I totally agree. Getting ready to go on a hunting trip is almost as meaningful as the trip and traditions are really an important part of the whole experience. The same was true of the Winous Point gun club. They had their own traditions and customs. To start with, it was a club rule that members could only use a double barrel shotgun and back then, that meant side by sides, over-and-unders were just becoming available. They had some of the most impressive guns you can imagine: Fox, Purdy, Greener, etc.
I think one of their customs that I thought was most interesting was how they decided who would hunt where. It started with glasses of good brown liquor and cigars, in front of the fireplace in the den. They would chat, sip and puff before dinner in the evening and quietly pass a pill bottle around (the type you use in billiard games and as the bottle passed, they would each pull a pill and at the end, the lowest number drawn would get first pick of all the blinds on the property and the second lowest the next pick, etc, etc. They, of course, had to take wind direction, weather, and the time of the season into account in deciding which blind they would choose. The members hunted from Monday morning to Saturday morning, leaving for home at noon. In those days you couldn’t hunt in Ohio on Sunday. I’m not sure if it’s still that way or not. This gave rise to another tradition that the members may or may not have been aware of…Saturday afternoons!!!
As soon as the last member loaded his car and left, there would be a flurry of activity as the punters ran around getting their gear together and loading boats to head out for the p.m. hunt. Yep, we got the run of the whole club and got to experience what it was like to be “well-to-do”. We would pair up with another punter and head out to our favorite location and hunt until dark. It really didn’t usually take that long to get a limit. I would have worked for free just for the Saturday afternoons. It was truly wondrous. To give you an idea of what it was really like, I’ll tell you about one Saturday afternoon that I remember clearly. This particular Saturday afternoon was overcast and fairly windy. I teamed up with another punter named Gary and we headed up the Bay to Cherry Island and when we got there, we put out his 6 (sigh) LL Bean cork decoys….I didn’t have any…and pushed our boat into the cattails. We had a pair of teal make a pass and we both shot once. As I remember, we both missed. When the next duck decoyed, it was his shot and when he tried to take the shot, his gun, an old double, wouldn’t fire. He pulled it down and as he looked for the problem, he dropped a small part over the side and put his gun out of operation for the rest of the hunt. We decided to keep hunting and share my old cheap J.C. Higgins pump gun. Ya, it even had a poly choke. To make a long story short, we hunted an hour or so, trading off my gun after each shot and killed 2 limits of seven ducks each and one goose. It was one of those days you would never forget.
Something else I remember that I thought was pretty unusual was that as the season progressed and the weather started getting colder, I noticed that the old time punters started carrying shovels with them into the marsh. I’d noticed this for several weeks before I found out what they were for. One morning one of the longtime punters and I took a couple of members and their guests up the bay to hunt in an inlet off of the North side of the Bay. When we got there, we found that the inlet had frozen out from the shore about forty yards, or so. The ice was only an inch or so thick, but would have required a lot of time and effort to clear and area for the decoys. My mentor that morning, shovel in hand, waded out a few yards in front of the blind, breaking the ice as he went. The water that splashed up on to the skiff of the snow covering the surrounding ice turned it dark and made it look like an opening. He then worked his way around the opening and using his shovel to scoop up mud from the bottom and make piles of mud on the ice at the edges of his little pond in the ice. We put a few regular desk in the water, and as a finishing touch, he added a few six inch long stalks of cattails to some of his mud decoys, to simulate necks and heads. The whole thing ended up looking pretty good and it actually worked, our gunners actually got their ducks.
The duck cleaning shack was another interesting part of the operation. Growing up, we usually either dry picked our ducks or dunked them in a pot of boiling water and then picked them. Either way, it was a time consuming process. The setup at the club was really a tremendous improvement and given the number of ducks that we processed on a daily basis, a real necessity. There was a four foot long by twelve inch wide trough that was about twelve inches deep. The trough, sat above a row of four or five propane burners, which heated 5-6 inches of water in the trough to boiling. They then dropped in a dozen, or so, large cakes of paraffin, which melted and floated on top of the water. Once this was ready, you took a duck, and wearing a pair of heavy rubber gloves, you dunked the duck into the paraffin and rubbed the paraffin into the feathers. After you got the duck thoroughly coated, you hooked its head in a wire hook above the trough and stripped the excess paraffin back into the water by applying pressure and running your hands downward from the ducks neck to tail. The next step was to let the duck cool until the paraffin was hard. You could then peel the ducks feather off like peeling a banana. It really worked slick and when you finished, you had a clean picked duck, skin intact, with only a few pinfeathers to pluck. You finished up by cutting off the feet and gutting them. Then they went into wire baskets with the members name on it and into a big walk-in refrigerator, where they stayed for a couple of days before the kitchen staff wrapped them for the freezer.
4/24/09 Friday
Sneaked out of the office at noon, and Cole and I hooked up the boat and headed to Navajo. We got a bit of a late start because it was the first trip of the year….and because we waited around for Matt to show up. (long story on mis-communication). Anyway, when we got to the marina, we needed to get New Mexico fishing licenses, etc. and by the time we got the boat into the water and headed out, it was after 2pm. The wind had come up and there was a pretty good chop on the lake so we got to enjoy a dose of cold spray on the way out, into the wind. We ran down the lake a couple of miles and tried for croppies in several different coves, no luck. We may need some lessons on where and how to fish this lake. We did have fun with the boat. It was really stable and easy to fish from. On the way back in, we opened up and it moves well! The only negative, was that the flat bottom square bow seems to throw up a lot of spray in rough water. I’m really looking forward to a lot of time on the water this summer.
