Story 30 of 52

By M. Snarky

In the summer of 1971, my dad took my younger brother Scott and I fishing on the shore of the Sacramento river…at night. I was 10 and Scott was 8. This, we were soon to find out, was going to be an unexpected adventure.

My dad loaded up our fishing gear and folding camp chairs and a metal Coleman cooler full of 12-ounce cans of Budweiser and Shasta cola then drove us to the “secret fishing spot” in his stock, white top with Glenwood Green body, 1964 Chevy C10 long-bed pickup. At first, we were driving along a 2-lane highway and then turned onto a narrow 2-lane county road that generally paralleled the curves of the great river to the farmland far beyond the city lights of Sacramento. Then he turned onto a rutty single lane dirt road and drove for a half-mile or so to a small, flat clearing amongst the oak trees that dotted the muddy banks of the ancient river.

There was a large bonfire, and there were about a half-dozen other men with pickups and a few more boys who happened to be running around the bonfire. So much for the secret fishing spot! My dad barely had the truck parked when Scott and I gleefully hopped out of the pickup and into the arms of the warm, firelit summer night.

We quickly introduced ourselves to the other boys and immediately engaged in the ongoing activities which basically consisted of running around the bonfire while throwing more wood into it…or anything else that we thought would burn.

Meanwhile, my dad met up with his buddies, and in the illumination of a Coleman lantern, they began to get themselves set up to fish for the largest fish in the Sacramento river – green sturgeon! They had thick fishing rods with large Penn reels and heavy line that they rigged up with big lead weights and huge fishing hooks. For bait, they impaled chicken leg or chicken thigh meat onto the fishhook and wrapped it up tight with panty hose. Yes, these men traveled around with panty hose in their tackle boxes. I’m sure their wives understood.

After rigging everything up, they cast out the lines with a back-and-forth swinging motion of the fishing rod to build up enough momentum to get the bait as close to the deep middle part of the river as they could, and after a big splash, the waiting game between man and fish began. Or was it a drinking game that began between man and man? They also smoked cigars and joked around quite a bit. Apparently, there was a lot of downtime fishing for sturgeon.

As my dad explained it to us, a sturgeon doesn’t strike like other freshwater fish. A bluegill, trout, or largemouth bass, for example, will take the bait and quickly swim off with it and this is easily detectable by the action on the fishing rod at which time you set the hook with a pulling action. A sturgeon, however, is pretty much a gigantic prehistoric suckerfish, and they will instead gently pull on the bait as they try to suck the chicken meat off of the hook. The only way to detect it is by “feeling” the fishing rod for successive tugs, and when you think you have one on the line, yank the rod back hard to set the hook. Hooking a sturgeon is one thing, but landing a sturgeon was described as, “reeling in a pickup truck.” We witnessed one of the men working for what seemed like an hour before he landed a massive sturgeon on the riverbank.

In the meantime, Scott, and I, on our Shasta cola caffeine and sugar high, were fishing our brains out for catfish with our light tackle setup using nightcrawler worms for bait. We caught tons of them and threw all of them back into the river after convincing ourselves that a bigger one was out there lurking, worthy of us to keep on fishing for “the big one.”

It was getting late, and Scott and I decided to take a break and go sit down on a log that was against a tree near the bank of the river. We sat down with a collective sigh. One moment later, the “log” violently convulsed, sending the two of us running off in full, screaming-boy panic mode. After a few seconds of sheer terror passed, we stopped to collect ourselves. We looked back and reasoned that since a log is not a living thing it is impossible for one to move like that, so it had to be something else. We slowly walked back to investigate. As we got closer, we could see more detail. Funny thing: in the dark, a sturgeon looks a lot like a log. Now that we positively identified what we were actually looking at, which was, in fact, not a log, we moved in for a closer look. It was a fascinating creature that looked as if it came from another time…or another planet! It convulsed again, and we jumped back in unison, this time laughing a little bit at ourselves. We found out it was a sturgeon that was caught earlier in the night.

That last thing I remembered about that night was that I crawled into the cab of the truck and fell asleep. But my dad, who got skunked fishing, brought home a dozen or so thick sturgeon steaks that were given to him by one of his fishing buddies.

At home, my dad previously converted an old Kenmore refrigerator into a cold smoker that sat outside on the patio. He cold smoked all of those lovely sturgeon steaks into absolute smoked fish nirvana! I think he thought that he was going to have smoked fish for weeks to enjoy with his ice-cold Bud, but it was not meant to be…because us kids found his stash in the garage refrigerator, and we wiped it out in a matter of days!

Sorry dad, love you!

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