
Originally Posted by
Yak Fish
When I had just turned 15, I was fishing the pond below the Kildaire Farm barn with a buddy under the covered boat dock on a cold, rainy day in February in 1976 (sometimes ya' just gotta fish). The water was muddy and it had been sleeting off & on. The fish weren't interested in anything we'd been fishing with. My buddy took his jig and tipped it with a piece of baloney from the sandwiches he'd brought. When he dropped it over the side of the dock, the jig never hit the bottom. A nice crappie had inhaled it and was hooked the the throat. The baloney was still on the hook and he caught another crappie within a minute of catching the first. Both fish went in the bucket. I was hitting him up for a sliver of baloney when he caught a third crappie... Excitedly, I dropped my jig off the dock, but it did hit the bottom. I jigged it up & down a few times, then it hung on something heavy. I snatched up on the rod and it lifted off the bottom, then went back down. It wasn't bucking like a catfish or eel, and I knew turtles wouldn't be active in the cold. I pulled up on the rod again and it lifted off the bottom again, so I reeled down and pumped the rod up, gaining line. Finally, it broke the surface, it was 6 unopened 16 oz. cans of Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull that somebody must have kocked off the dock by accident. My jig had hooked into the plastic rings that held all the cans together. Being mischevious young men, we decided not to waste the beers and drank them all like we were dying of thirst. Bad idea, as it wasn't too long before I had to go home. I walked in the door and went straight to bed, because that Bull was kicking every inch of my 15 year old 110 pound butt. That was the last time I tried to grab a bull by the horns.
Hadn't thought about that day in a long time! Thanks for the thread to help dredge that memory up. There's a strip mall where the barn used to sit and Kildaire Farm Road is now 5 lanes wide, very developed, there's a Parkway running right through the middle of the farm, and I have no idea where the nearest cow is to there anymore. There's houses and townhomes built all around that pond. It's sad to see. I'm happy to have seen and experienced that place when it was a working farm.
Jim