The Downside of Ample Parking

I prefer to have a little elbowroom when I am fishing. That shoulder-to-shoulder stuff gets old in a hurry. But sometimes, especially when traveling to unfamiliar waters, you have to take what you can get. There was a brief window of fishing opportunity recently in Kansas. A meager couple of diversionary hours to fish with my cousin, Aaron. I braced myself for a throng of anglers as we planned to hit a popular fishing area known as Rocky Ford, near Manhattan, KS.

$5.50 for a 24-hour out-of-state license and another $3.48 for a little blue plastic tub of night crawlers and we were ready to try our luck below this small dam, about ½ mile below the giant dam of Tuttle Creek Reservoir. One brochure lists the primary species as channel catfish, flathead catfish, white bass, and walleye. A month earlier, I saw a father and son with a stringer that included one hybrid white bass, one small flathead, one small drum, and a 4-pound bigmouth buffalo. But judging from the piles of dead gar that greeted us, I think another species deserves to make the list.

With the discovery of very few cars in the parking area, I was jazzed. I mean, it was a weekday, and everyone was just working, right? I saw the sign, but didn’t want to read it. Work day or not, if the fish are biting, anglers will be there.

With a distinct lack of hits after fishing the first half hour, doubt began to gnaw. We needed something to change our luck. The only other anglers, a young couple, soon began to pack up.

“You want some minnows?” the guy asked.

I hesitated. On one hand, free minnows could be just the break we needed. On the other, it has been my experience that if minnows are being given away, it is time to try a different spot. Or skip rocks. It was both a generous donation and an unspoken taunt, saying “I’ll bet you can’t catch anything either.”

There have been days when I have bought minnows and not caught a fish. Didn’t really bother me. I knew what I was getting into and could temper my optimism accordingly. But the surprise of gift minnows… can be a disorienting ride of chance. When you buy tickets to see people perform, generally you know what you are going to get. When people just show up on your doorstep, it could be Jehovah’s Witnesses… Or it could be the Schwan man.

Foolishly, I accepted the challenge.

Then I realized I didn’t have a bucket. Fortunately, cousins Kelsey and Lucas also arrived on the scene and so we poured the minnows over the ice in Kelsey’s empty soda cup. 32 oz. of disoriented golden shiners. Mmmm.

It was a beautiful day and I hadn’t fished with Aaron in years. We hoped we could do something others could not. And fishing is all about hope. So, under power lines decorated with dangling lures, weights, and line, we threw all that we had at them.

Lures, bait, it didn’t matter. Nothing was hungry that day. We had some little taps, but never anything steady enough to set the hook. In the trapped backwater pool, we saw many small sunfish and several gar rise but no surface activity in the main channel. When our time was up, we had been “skunked”, and not just from the rotting gar carcasses.

Hiking back to the car, Aaron showed me where he caught a big flathead a couple of years ago. The water only has to come up, oh,… about 30 feet.