Bobber Rigs are a Mystery to Today’s Youth
By Dennis Smith
I took my grandkids to one of my favorite bluegill ponds the other day to show them how we caught fish back in the day. I hoped to introduce them to the simple charms of fishing with a cane pole and bobber rig like I used when I was their age, but I should have known better.
They’re so far ahead of me technologically in most matters that it isn’t even funny. After all, they’ve been playing with Game Boys, smartphones, iPads, iPods, laptops and those MP3 thingies for most of their cognitive years, so my simple stick and string fishing pole came off as incredibly primitive to them. “Really, Pop? You actually used to catch fish with that? Yikes! Were you poor or didn’t they have reels back in the olden days?”
Sigh.
I explained that cane poles and bobbers may seem primitive to them, but they’re still highly favored by many serious anglers for hooking bluegills and similar pan fish, especially in the Deep South where they’re as trendy as corn bread and chicken on Sunday afternoon. They’re impossibly cheap, trouble-free and remarkably efficient. In fact, a properly rigged cane pole is quite often the ultimate choice for presenting small live baits like crickets, red wigglers (manure worms) and tiny grass shrimp in the slow-moving creeks, bayous and detention ponds so prevalent throughout Dixie.
That point was made clear to me many years ago when I was invited to a bluegill outing near Fort Rucker, Alabama, where my son was training as an army aviator. The post commander, a bank president and a handful of Dale County officials were in the group, and all fished with cane poles and bobbers baited with field crickets. They caught far more fish with their cane and cricket rigs than I did with my fancy fly-fishing gear and were happy to offer some helpful Southern advice: “Y’all need to gitchya one of these here cane poles if ya wanna catch these shellcrackers.” (Shellcracker being Southern slang for the big redear sunfish distinctively adapted for eating snails, mollusks and aquatic hard-shelled critters, hence the clever moniker.)
Anyway, I was relating all of this to the urchins, but they were having none of it. They had modern graphite spinning rods rigged with open-faced reels, and they loved to cast them.
I caught a few bluegills on the cane pole but spent most of my time unhooking their fish and helping them bait their hooks, which is as it should be. They caught a stringer full of bluegills and while we were driving home, they asked me to tell them the story about cane pole fishing in Alabama again. “Why?” I asked. “Do you think you might like to get one?”
“Nah,” Brandon said. “We just like the part about the other guys catching more fish than you.”