Due to the length of Babe's amazing and unique meeting, we will re-cap his event in a three part series.

Babe shared his amazing fishing insights by telling them through his life experiences. It was truly a wonderful, passionate and personal conversation that captivated us all. The amazing journey of his life story was one we could all relate to and reminded us all of our past. A wonderful era, when the little things like a stream and fishing helped us forget the hard times, and gave us something to look forward to every day.

Part one, The Stream and Patterns

Every one of us had some magical connection that turned us on to the love of fishing. The Stream was Babe’s. Babe was five years old when they moved onto the new family farm. It had a stream on the property and he had never seen one before. He was mesmerized by its wonder, the way it bubbled, swirled, curled and do whatever it did. “When you have never seen something before and all of sudden, there it is, in all its grandeur, wow”.
He would watch it and watch it and watch it. One day he saw something amazing. His dad later told him the story, that he came running up from the stream and said “I seen some striped Marlin in the stream! You have to get a rod and reel hooked up for me”. His dad had a chuckle and proceeded to outfit him with a classic 4 ½ foot steel rod and a Pfleuger reel, that didn’t really cast. Babe said “I didn’t know what they were but they were fish and I was determined to catch them”. Well he caught a whole mess of them “Stri-ped suckers” that day and by gosh they were going to eat them, and they did. He fell in love that day with the sport of fishing. Every time he wasn’t doing chores he was down at that stream. It didn’t matter what he caught, as long as something bit he was a happy camper.

“Everything in nature revolves around patterns and these patterns are repeatable. Everything in nature revolves around one instinct, survival of the fittest. Everything in nature is in a battle for survival every single moment”.
                                                                             
Babe began to realize the fish followed patterns that repeated year after year.

  • The Suckers ran in spring.
  • Then the Northerns, which were a whole lot easier to clean then a sucker and its 9 million bones.
  • The Biggest fish in the stream during summer were river Shiners, Chubs, Suckers and Bullheads.
  • Started realizing that sometimes the fish would be in the deep hole of the rapids, or sometimes in the rapids, sometimes above the rapids in the slack water. The fished moved around, and it was because of food.
  • With time he realized July 1st is when the fish were in the deep holes.
  • Crappies spawn when the lilacs bloom.
  • Fish digest slower in cold water, so the pattern is to eat and then move into shallow warm water to digest.
  • Fish will always seek out the best way to grow (fatten) and make it through the lean times. Always, survival instincts.

"The more you dig into the patterns the more you will get hooked on it."

End of part one, more to come next month with Babe.

Russell Nelson
Board Member of TCWU