Center Feature:  

The Lost Love Of Live Bait

By Michael Hahn

I’ve got a shiny bass boat with two sonar units, automatic tilt and trim, 4-cycle outboard and all the bells and whistles. I’ve got a computer with high speed access to the internet that can instantly connect me to every fish & wildlife department or guide service in the world. A GPS unit will unerringly direct me to hidden humps under the largest lakes. There are even TV cameras which can be attached to downrigger lines, and send an image back to a screen in the boat which will show exactly what is hitting a lure. What will the future bring? The increasing advancement of technology might someday produce a futuristic gizmo that will locate, catch, fillet and freeze fish for the consumer while he multi-tasks at home. Is this what we really want?

The Love Of Worms

Like many lifelong anglers, my earliest fishing experiences involved live bait. When I was knee-high, Dad let me tag along while he fished the brook near our home. Dad showed me how to thread an aptly named angle worm onto a size eight hook and flip it into the dark pockets where trout lurked. Sometimes Dad set the hook, then handed me the rod so I could land a frantically thrashing, 6-inch brook trout. As I grew more adept, Dad taught me how to detect a nibble and set the hook myself. I responded with such enthusiasm that I catapulted the little fish from the stream high into the air, tangling the line into tree limbs and suspending my wiggling prey in midair. By the time I was six years old, I could bait my own hook and fish the pools near home by myself.

A few years later, when I had learned to swim well, my parents allowed me to accompany my grandfather in his canoe on the Connecticut River. Although Grandpa Hahn was in his 80s and had never learned how to swim, he frequently ventured onto the big river in pursuit of perch and horned pout. Every Friday our family of seven ate fish, many caught by Grandpa, who used a cement block on a length of clothesline to anchor his canoe in a good spot. He preferred size six hooks, snelled because his eyesight was failing, baited with either a worm or a piece of nightcrawler and weighted with a long, lead sinker. Grandpa cast his bait out and let it sit on bottom for maybe five minutes. If he didn’t get a bite, he reeled in very slowly. Sometimes the fish preferred a stationary bait, sometimes a moving bait. If three or four casts didn’t produce, Grandpa moved the canoe. Sooner or later he found a school of feeding fish and boated a bucketful.

It was a different age, and worms weren’t available in grocery stores the way they are today. Catching them was an art in itself, and was often left to the hands of eager youngsters. Often, on nights after rainstorms, a handful of flashlight beams could be found piercing the darkness searching for nightcrawlers on many town greens across the North Country. The crawlers had been driven to the surface by the torrential downpour, and waited there motionless. The challenge was to pounce on it quickly once it was spotted, before it retreated back down the hole.

Often, a crawler would be grabbed half-in and half-out of the hole. A tug-of-war of sorts pursued. Too much pressure broke the crawler in two, while too little let it escape. The key was to be patient, the crawler would grow tired quickly, and release its bond with the earth after a few seconds. 

My maternal grandfather, Grandpa Darby, owned a minnow trap. He showed me how to bait it with stale bread. Grandpa Darby liked to fish in ponds with minnows under a bobber, big enough that the minnow could tow it, but not pull it under. When the bobber went under, it was time to set the hook into a trout or bass.

Things That Swim, Bite And Pinch

Dad taught me how to catch grasshoppers on cool, late-summer mornings, before the hoppers had warmed enough to be elusive. When we had gathered a dozen hoppers into a quart canning jar with a perforated lid, Dad and I drove to either the Waits River or the Wells River, slithered toward the stream on our bellies, carefully extracted a hopper from the jar (while trying to keep the others inside), impaled the bug on a light hook, and tossed the unweighted hook into the stream to tempt wary, low-water brown trout. Grasshoppers were effective and exciting to fish.

Grandpa Hahn tried to convince me that the big, white grubs that loved to chew the roots of our strawberry plants were the best bait. I tried them, and the results did not match his proclamations. I noticed that Grandpa rarely used grubs himself, preferring earthworms, so I deduced that he was simply trying to persuade me to remove pests from the garden.

Occasionally I read one of the outdoors magazines, which taught me about exotic baits that my mentors rarely used. I tried crickets and goldenrod grubs with little success. I had better luck with frogs. Hooked through the lips and skittered across weedy backwaters, live frogs often produced thrilling strikes from bass, pickerel or pike. I enjoyed catching the frogs, too, wading in the shallows to grab them with my quick, young hands. When I caught frogs that were too big for bait, Ma fried the frog legs. Tasted like chicken.

As much as I enjoyed catching frogs, I loved catching crayfish even more. My buddies and I devised a system. Wading on shallow, rocky points in the Connecticut River, one kid crouched in the water with a small net ready, while another kid turned over a small rock. Many times the crayfish hiding beneath the rocks darted away from one kid into the waiting net. A friend and I once caught 44 crayfish in an afternoon. The biggest ones wound up boiled for the dinner table. Tasted like lobster.

Recently, I heard of a new trick for catching crayfish. It involves taking a bed sheet and letting it sink to the bottom of a stream or pond which has a suitable crayfish population. Rocks are used to hold down the corners, and an onion bag filled with fish guts is weighted down and placed in the middle of the sheet. After a few hours, the crayfish are attracted to the guts, and two “fishermen” pick up the sheet by the corners, thus trapping all the crayfish on it.

Speaking of edible baits, I learned to use smelt for lake trout and salmon in the deeper lakes. I loved the taste of deep-fried smelt so much that I was careful to conserve baits, as I wanted some left over for dinner.

Several years ago I heard an old-timer tell me about using a rubber band to attach a big hook to live field mice. The mice were then cast into the lake and allowed to swim back to shore, hopefully enticing a big pike or bass along the way. While I have never tried it, the method has stuck in my mind.

When I was still an impressionable lad, our neighbor, Otis Emerson, taught me how to catch big bass on artificial lures like Dardevle spoons and harnessed Creme worms. Set on the road to perdition, I soon succumbed to the seduction of shiny, store-bought lures. Eventually I learned to fly fish, but I never became a purist or completely abandoned my roots. Even today, when I really need to catch fish, I reach for live bait, especially if I am pursuing a wary lunker, the kind that seems to believe the old Steve Miller song lyrics: “Nothing but the real thing makes my bell ring.”