There many memories and many fishing trips me and my Pops went on together. Sometimes even when he didn't want me to come along....

My very 1st fishing trip with my Pops as I can remember it. We were at Lakeside Park in Dallas in the mid to late 70s. We were pretty much poor. Pops had one rod/reel and we kids got fishing line tied to a stick and a piece of small styrofoam for a bobber and bread was our bait. Us kids had fun catching gills & sunfish. Pops was catching big fish (carp). After nagging my Pops all day long to try his rod/reel, he finally relented. He tied on some kinda lure so he could teach me how to cast and retrieve. Once I got the hang of it, he left me alone and I was casting left and right. I finally got tired becoz I wasn't catching anything and didn't know if I was doing it right. On my last retrieve I got a HUGE hit! I instantly set the hook and yelled for my Pops. He comes running and takes the rod from me. He's fighting the fish and I can see water splashing everywhere.....and then SNAP! The line broke! I was so excited and was mad at my Pops for losing the fish. My Pops started laughing and said I didn't think you would catch anything becoz I tied on a tore up & rusted old lure. He didn't want to lose his good lures... Ever since then, I've been addicted to fishing.

Fast forward a few years, I'm a teenager by now in the 80s. Me & my Pops went fishing at Lavon below the dam. I remember my pops couldn't cast in that far towards the dam so he came up with an idea. He'd tied ballon or small beach ball to the end of his line and behind the balloon/beach ball would be 2 floats/bobber made from styrofoam and under the bobbers would a 5 ft leader line & hook with live shad as bait. With this rig he would stand in the middle in the water below the dam and let the balloon/beach ball drift towards the dam and every time the balloon/beach ball got really close to the dam, he would get a hit. His bobbers were rectangular in shape and would just stand up vertically when fish was on. It was a really neat thing to see. After that day, other people that fished below the dam were copying his rig...

I fell in the water one day when the dam was releasing water. We were fishing on the parking lot side and had a big stringer of fish. I noticed the stringer was being pushed up to the rocks by the current I picked up the heavy stringer and attempted to throw it back in. The stringer went back in and so did I...lost my balance As I was swimming back with the current pusing me down stream, all I can see was my pops face with an expression of "you better not have lost that stringer" When I raised my hand up showing him the stringer, he smiled. This was a cold day in the fall too no spare clothes. My pops just sent me back to the car with car keys to start the car and turn on the heater. I went back to the car and thought I got it started so I turned on the heater. As I waited for the car to warm up, I noticed it was getting colder. Checked to make sure the heater was selected which it was but not getting warm. Figured it was gonna take a few more minutes to warm up. What seemed like forever, my dad came to check on me and asked why the car wasn't started? I was shivering beyond my control. My pops jumped in and started the car and got the heater going. He ran back down to go get our fishing gear and rushed me home. He said I was turning blue!!!! I didn't even catch a cold either....

Another time at Lavon fishing on the opposite side of the parking lot, my dad sent me to go get his cigs from the car. To do this, I had to walk up a hill, walk across the dam/bridge, down a hill to the parking lot. I got lazy on my way back and decided to swim across. Since water wasn't being released and there's barely a current I jump in from the parking lot side and swam back to my dad to the other side. When I got to my Pops, instead of being impressed, he told me to never ever do something stupid like that again. One day my Pops put me on bait duty. I was using a cast net to try to get some shad. Shad was scarce that day so I had to wade around in waist high water. Catching only 2-3 shad at a time, I got tired & told my Pops this would be my last throw of the cast net. As I was pulling in the net, it got snagged on a rock. As I usually do when I get a snag, I dove down into the water to get the net unsnagged. While under the water feeling for the rock, I felt something slimey and moving. Startled, I jumped up really quick and started pulling really hard on the net towards the bank. What I thought was a snag at 1st , turn out to be a HUGE flathead. My guess would have been about 20-30lbs. My Pops didn't like flatheads so we gave it away.

My Pops doesn't fish anymore now. Not because he's too old or ill or anything like that. In his old age and being a devout Buddhist, he doesn't believe in taking a life even if it's to sustain your family. I think, the real reason is my Moms... She worries about him when he's out fishing. When I was a kid, my Pops was my bestest good friend I ever had! I really miss those days with him.

Those are great stories. You're really lucky. I never knew my dad. I had to learn both how to fish and how to be a man by myself.

Thanks for sharing. I like those stories. My dad was a car guy and we only fished a few times. My best friend and his dad got me into fishing in my teens. Nice to hear a little history about you too. Lets see??? You said a teenager in the 80's right? That would put you about my age and you call me the old man?

That's what I was wondering. I was a freshman in '89. Ren is old!

My dad use to get me up real early to go fishing. He would make us scrambled egg sandwichs to take with us. To this day I cant eat scrambled eggs without relating it to fishing.

Y'all made me smile and then get a little sad since my Dad died years ago.

I can remember him falling off a rock with chest waders on when it was really cold out and popping back up with the rod still in his hand. Wanting me to take the rod before he'd let me help him out of the water...I remember fishing a small stream for trout with our spinning gear using salmon eggs and worms. Then watching as a guy in full fly fishing gear came wading down the stream catching a bunch of fish right in the hole we had been fishing with no success. Dad saying let's go because we need waders and fly rods (neither of us had ever tried fly lashing before)

Him getting stopped for speeding at 3AM while we were headed to the coast to go deep sea fishing, in the middle of our local town and asking the cop if he had already found all the real criminals and had nothing better to do at 3AM. Yeah you do get a ticket when you do that.

Him telling his buddy from work to meet us at 4 or so and we'd do some shad fishing. The buddy came at 4AM cause he didn't know shad liked the afternoon better. Standing at the front door in waders and all.
*L..yeah we got dressed and went fishing.

Good stuff from all of you. My father taught me to hunt and fish but don't do either with him anymore. Makes me want to plan something before he gets too old. Thanks guys.

Dont worry about saying you were a teenager in the 80's...i was also.

Great story Ren.

I'm not THAT old Todd, at least not yet...My freshman year was '87.

@MR - I graduated in '91 so I'm NOT Todd old

good times 4 sure!

dads ARE special. MR i know u spend a lot of time with ur kiddos

my dad n i just finished talking about how excited he recalls i got when i caught my 1st cat.
my youngest, 3yrs old at the time, man handling the sandbass ;~)

Great stories. Dad died in '85 when I was 8. Lived with/raised by my grandparents from then till I got married in '95. My grand dad really got me hooked on fishing. Everything from Sandies on the Brazos to reds and specks in port a. We'd never catfished till I got into it a couple years ago. Sure do relish every time we can get out together. I'm blessed to be able to see both of my grandparents every day. I bought a house 5 doors down and I'm their mail man.

Oh and all you guys are old.

DANG....Ren your OLD!!!!!

Thanks for the post ... great stories ... reminds me of my youth growing up in North Alabama.

Every spring when the crappie would start biting, my dad would let me skip school for a day and we would go over to the Elk River and rent a jon boat and paddle and crappie fish. Cane poles and minners for the most part. And walking the creek near my Grandmother's spending all day bream fishing. And night fishing that creek for mudcat. And getting up early to go squirrel and rabbit hunting every year on Thanksgiving morning. And I could go on and on ...

Good times and great memories!!

Ha Ha thats funny! Whats even more funny is you are Todd old.


HEY! I resemble that remark!

These stories are great! My first son was born on January 20, 2012. I can't wait to make memories for him to talk about some day. My dad loves to fish. I grew up about 10 minutes from Lake Somerville. That is where we did most of our fishing, and where I learned to love it. We would tear up the white bass and hybrids. I'll never forget catching my first 25+ incher on a slab. We would troll until almost dark, then we would check all the humps and try to find them surfacing and cast slabs into the schools. It was a blast, and definitely some of my favorite memories.

I foul hooked a big ol buffalo one time while trolling with my dad. It was like dragging a car battery up to the boat. I had never seen anything like that before. That was quite the surprise.

Then when I was about 8 or so, my grandparents bought a canal house in Galveston. And to this day, that is about my favorite vacation spot. It's great to fish all night in your own back yard. It's so exciting to fish saltwater, you never know what you'll pull out of the water! My grandpa has always loved to fish too. I suppose that's where my dad got it. I sure have some great memories of fishing all night for specs and redfish in the canal with him.

Anyway, thanks for reminding me of all my great memories Ren.

No problem man! Everyone has a fishing story about them & their pops or moms/uncle/grand pop/friend/neighbor someone who got them addicted to fishing. Hope more stories get added on. I have more I'll add on later as they come back to me....

I'm kind of a new father myself. My son turn 2 last Dec. Can't wait to get home on the water with me.

I've been blessed with parents that understood the importance of an outdoor education and have taken us kids since before I can even remember. I can remember bank fishing for sunfish on the Cedar river in Williamston, Michigan with my mom as dad was out in the boat. It has been that way all my life..

Kinda like when now, when I was a kid I mostly fished alone. I can remember one time when I was probably 6 years old my mom took me to the red river just below the damn. I think we were visiting some family in Colbert or something at the time. Any way I had this chittly old zebco that I'd found at a garage sale. And I was out there throwing worms in the river. No bobber, nothing but a couple of split shot weights and an aberdeen hook, on this crappy old combo that was strung with 10 year old half rotten mono that was no more than 8 pound test.
But I'm casting and I'm reeling and after about twenty minutes or so of that my mom says its time to go and I say one more cast mom please. So I make my cast and it is a good one. I'm reeling it in bumping along the bottom because the retreve is so slow on this reel. And all of a sudden my crappy old rod bends in half. And it starts stripping line and spools me in less than a minute and heading down stream. SO I'm running along the shore line hoping my line doesn't break. At this point I've never caught anything bigger than a bluegill. Some how I got that fish turned and reeled it in. My mom has a on old picture somewhere of me standing next to 43" striper that some dood at the river held up for me while I was holding my chitty old zebco nightcrawler all chewed up but dangling from the hook.
And yeah, I let it go after the picture got taken.

Great stories, Ren! I fished with my dad only once a year, or so, after I moved to Texas from Missouri. We'd meet at a different midwest lake every spring with a bunch of other friends from high school and their dads for a tournament. My pop would make the obligatory trip to the tackle store ahead of time and would pull out some outrageous new contraption called a Whizzapopper or something like that...every trip in the middle of the day on Saturday. After enduring the derision from my brother and I, he'd patiently tie on his new bait and start flinging it. If we were fishing a shallow flat with brush, the "magic bait" would be a deep diving crankbait or a lead tailspinner lure. If we were fishing a deep point or bluff, it would be a topwater or an unweighted brown plastic worm with three hooks, beads and a propeller on the front. And half the time, it seems, he'd be hooked up within the hour with the big fish of the tournament.
I have a lot of great memories of fishing with my Pops, too.
Cherish your dads and moms, guys. There is no other feeling in the world like the moment you realize that you will never speak to your dad (or mom) again.

FM

Even though he doesn't fish anymore, my Pops ALWAYS ask about my fishing trips when I go drop off some of my catches. Especially like right now, the fall/winter crappie run, he'll ask me what color was working best at what depth, fast or slow presentation, jig & bobber or vertical jigging. As I tell him what was working, I can see him smiling like he's enjoying my fishing tales... Then I'd ask him to just come fishing with me and he's answer is always "I can't. you're mom won't let me"