By Ro
BCJ News 

Bear Paw Meanderings

 

May 24, 2017



A friend was in the office the other day saying how he liked my stories about fishing on Clear Creek. He went on to say that he had fished, as a boy on Beaver Creek and Sandy Creek and how it was about the same.

Traditionally this time in May was the opening of fishing season on streams. Not true today. Bear Paw streams are, for the most part, open all year long making for not much fun these days like it was in the old days when there was an opening day.

I cannot say what the kind of fishing I did was called as it would be a racist remark these days. Suffice to say that I was never a fly fisherman. My dad was a fly fisherman as was Uncle Al Lucke. I have above my desk where I am writing these words, a picture of Francis Black fly fishing in Clear Creek. That was not for me.

My kind of fishing was a worm on the end of the hook in Anderson Creek or Henderson Creek and the biggest challenge in those narrow creeks was to make sure the fish did not see my shadow. Just a quiet entrance into the water and bang, I would usually get a hard hit from a big rainbow or brook trout. Then it was just a matter of pulling the beauty out, usually about 13 to 15 inches long, putting them on the willow creel I had just cut and it was on to another deep and narrow hole.

At the Diamond Bar ranch and at Billy Young’s ranch were two dams on Clear Creek that made for some very deep water and long waterways backed up by concrete dams. I fished there every so often but not a lot because I did not want to catch a sucker. That was sucker land and often I would get a sucker on the line and did not even know that a fish was on the line until I started to pull it out. It felt like I was hauling out an old boot or something but in the end there would be a five pound sucker, which I would put back in as it was known that suckers were not good for eating.

That was what I was after. If I could catch a mess of fish for the cook to cook up for breakfast I would have done a good thing for the day and been so proud of myself. And, oh, did those fish taste good!

But the secret was not to let the fish see your shadow. One morning my cousin Scotty went fishing and crawled on his belly half way across a field to get to Henderson Creek. Scotty had been awful for a couple of days to my other cousin Butch and myself so that morning Butch and I armed ourselves with every pot and pan we could carry and quietly scurried behind Scotty until finally he got to the creek where as he dropped his quiet hook and line in the creek, we tossed all those pots and pans above his head and into Henderson Creek. Oh, was Scotty mad. Matter of fact after chasing us around the cabin with a butcher knife he decided to walk to town. That afternoon my dad found him on the road and hauled him back to the cabin where we forgave him for trying to stab us. He never did forgive us, however. Sad.

Anyway, fishing on Clear Creek, what wonderful memories those were!

 
 

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