A real fish story

Rick Wimer

Even prior to moving to Storm Lake my dad, Leonard, was always a fisherman. When we lived in Ute, you would find him and yours truly at Blue Lake, Lake Okoboji or some small river in the surrounding area with a pole in our hands trying to bring in the catch of the day. At least dad was. 

I wasn’t blessed, me thinks, with fisherman genes. While I might occasionally catch one on any given expedition, most of the time you would find me exploring the trails in the area for adventures. I just wasn’t prone to sitting in one place for any lengthy period of time. 

Once we moved to Storm Lake, my dad found himself in “hog heaven.” He had this 3,000-acre lake to fish in to his heart’s content. And like any good dad would do, he always took me with him. And while he was pulling in massive number of bullheads or an occasional perch, blue gill or dreaded carp, the first chance I got, I was off exploring as many trails around the lake as I could possibly find. 

My favorite areas were on the banks of Chautauqua Park all the way down to Sunset Park and the shores down by the little island that was just behind our home on W. Third Street. When I reached 11 or 12  years of age, my dad gave up on me and fished by himself or with a work associate, Ralph Corderman.

He would always bring home tons of bullheads, skin them and fry them up to eat. And while I do recall them being tasty, over the years, as they became a staple to our diet plan, eventually I reached a state where I just couldn’t look another bullhead in the eye, much less eat one. 

With the loss of mom at age nine, dad took over the family meal preps. Most often we would eat bullheads two or three times a week, left over school lunch; dad was the lead custodian in the Storm Lake school system, an occasional rabbit or squirrel that he shot on some hunting trips.

And when we weren’t eating bullheads our meal plan balanced out with chicken pots pies.  So many chicken pot pies, that even today, when I pass by them at the grocery store, I just can’t look at them. I haven’t had one since starting work at the Bradford Hotel and meals were provided.

When I worked on the dredge on the night shift, massive amounts of bullheads would gather in this alcove created by the configuration of the dredge drilling apparatus. I think they were drawn to the surface by the bright lights of the dredge. It seemed that they were haunting me for having eaten so many of their cohorts and friends. 

From bullheads to salmon

I have digressed.  This piece is about fishing, not eating. Once I left Storm Lake, I didn’t have another fishing pole in my hand until I was stationed in Alaska in 1966/67. In the late summer, early fall of my first year there, a group of my Air Force buddies asked me if I wanted to go silver salmon fishing with them on the Russian River, located on the Kenai Peninsula about 100 miles south of Elmendorf AFB where we were stationed, just outside of Anchorage.  

I reluctantly accepted their invitation. One of my buddies lent me a pole for fly fishing and another buddy lent me a holstered .357 magnum pistol, just in case we encountered a brown or black bear that inhabited the area searching for salmon. Are you kidding me?  The only thing I had ever shot in my life was a squirrel at Chautauqua Park with my BB gun. And when I hit it, it jumped high in the air, landed and scampered up a tree, sat on a branch and seemingly in squirrel voice chastised me for the pain it had endured. I vowed at that time that I would never shoot another squirrel and never, ever go hunting for any other game. And true to my word I never did. 

I was in awe of the .357 strapped around my waist, much less of my lack of knowledge of how to use it.  Salmon run up the Russian River by the hundreds of thousands in the summer and early fall to spawn, lay their eggs and die. It’s not a matter of trying to find them. You can virtually see thousands of them swimming by as you stand on the shore of the river. You are not allowed to use a strong test line, hook them and just drag them in.

You are virtually fly fishing with a light test line, a hook and a piece of colored yarn as a lure and gingerly working them in. It’s a lot different than throwing a bobber in Storm Lake and waiting for a bullhead to take the bait. It took me a whole morning and several broken lines to get the drift of it all before I was able to land three of them, the daily limit.  

They were huge, at least 15-20 pounds or more and at a minimum, 24 inches long. It was exciting and fun. I developed a new appreciation for fishing, sort of.  We took our catches to a local salmon processor where they cleaned, canned and/or smoked our catch so we could take it all back to our barracks. I wasn’t too fond of the canned salmon, but the smoked was tasty and a great snack at the beer parties we had in the barracks.   

Tune in next week for part II of this story.

Rick Wimer writes from Storm Lake.