My fishing story is similar.
Buddy introduced me to fly fishing on a remote private lake.
We tied 3 loops for 3 flies on the fly rods.
I took to fly casting like a duck to water.
For about an hour we were getting 2 and often 3 brook trout per cast.
That spoiled fishing for me for ever.
Yeah. I grew up on an oxbow lake about a hundred yards wide and a mile long. It used to be part of the river, but in the 30's as a WPA project, they cut it off from the main channel to make a Riverside Drive along the river. They thought the lake would lower, but instead, because of massive springs, it went up about 6' and consumed the dirt road that was on the inside curve of the lake. They made a public park on the inside curve on one side and there was a cemetery and vacant farmland on the escarpment overlooking the lake on the other side. It is documented that the French explorer LaSalle came up the river from Lake Michigan, turned west into that oxbow, and portaged up through a long ravine over to the Grand Kankakee Marsh, and eventually got to the Mississippi. He signed treaties with the native Americans at the Council Oak Tree in that cemetery.
My father and another man bought the farmland, subdivided it, and my father kept a lot overlooking the lake and LaSalle's portage for himself, and built a house there with his own hands. We had riparian rights, which meant we could get on and off the lake from our property and use any part of the lake that we liked. The lake had no boat ramp and no swimming was allowed by the public except at a beach at one end. So there was maybe a canoe or two once a year. We kept a row boat chained to a tree. People would bank fish from the park, but they could only cast out so far and no one could get to the deep side of the channel where the high banks and logs were. Man, I tell you, that lake had tons of 8" panfish, lots of largemouth, smallmouth, several species of catfish, perch, crappie, gar, pike, carp, bullheads, giant goldfish, 4-5 species of turtles, muskrats, an occasional mink, deer... you name it, it had it. Pretty much anywhere you tossed a hook the bobber wouldn't have time to stand up! It would just splash and keep on going down! If you put a frog on a hook you'd get a bass pretty much every cast. Crazy. And it was all ours. :laughing: I spent from age 8 to about age 24 on that lake as often as possible fishing and observing wildlife. It was a great place to grow up. Huge tracts of open farmland to the north. Secluded neighborhood. I even got a job lifeguarding at the beach. I'd swim to work! :laughing: It has changed a lot since.
Some bass fishermen got a bee in their bonnet and somehow convinced the DNR that there were too many rough fish in the lake, and they wanted a boat launch, etc... so the DNR came in the late 70's and killed all the fish in the lake. I pulled out 20+ largemouth over 4 pounds and the biggest was 8 pounds on the day they killed the fish. I pulled out several hundred carp and gave them to the local ladies in the park. We kept a couple hundred bluegill, all over 8". It was pathetic.
That fall, they restocked it with bass, bluegill and channel cat. The first three fish I saw come out of the lake after restocking was a perch, a pike and a crappie, so that was a failure. Fishing has never been the same. There's a ridiculous amount of weeds in the lake now since they closed the public beach, so there's too many places for the bluegill to hide. I haven't seen a softshell turtle on that lake in 35 years. On my 50th birthday I caught 50 bluegill.... only 4 were over 6". The pike get up to high 20". There's a few 3-4 pound bass, but mostly 2 pounders and under. I've never seen a catfish. The crappies are 9-10" if you're lucky. They used to go 14".
So, pretty much every fishing trip I've taken since the late 70's has never measured up to the lake of my youth. Sure, I've had a good day on other lakes here and there. But it will never be the same. My mother passed away in the late 80's. My dad followed 8 years later. My siblings and I sold the house. It was my father's on-going architectural experiment and a money pit. He was OK with that and told us it was his dream, not ours, and we should make our own dreams, so we all have. I still go ice fishing right below the house every year, so I visit often. My folks are buried in the cemetery and I can stand at their graves and see the house and lake and think fondly of my youth, my folks, and my children. And I remember being a skinny little kid skipping school (with my mom's blessing) and rowing that boat out into the lake to cast a line just to see what would bite.
Here's a picture of that lake today. We lived on the west end on a 90' escarpment overlooking the lake. There were about 150 steps down to the lake. You can see the cemetery to the lower left. To the far right is the river. From that height, we could see across the treetops in the park, about two miles past the river is the University of Notre Dame. We'd see sunrises over the Golden Dome, and for about a week, two times each year, at sunset, the Dome would glow bright gold and you'd think holy thoughts. It was hard not to! :laughing: Go Irish!
