As much fun as fishing by John C. Street
 
I can’t say for certain but would hazard a guess that it happened sometime when I was in my early twenties.  And I think it had more to do with some high-brow  image that was rolling around in my head than anything else although I probably wouldn’t have admitted that at the time.
 
Regardless of when or why the transformation took place, sometime back in the 70s I started carrying a fly rod exclusively whenever I went trout fishing and - by definition at least - that meant I was beginning to use nothing but flies.  I remember distinctly, however, that I carried a nifty little empty plastic hook box for several years thereafter, a repository for a little stream-side bait if my growing fly fishing skills weren’t up to the challenge. 
 
While I’ve used live bait many times since then (night crawlers on worm harnesses for walleye in Lake Erie comes immediately to mind), it’s been a powerful number of years since I’ve fished a stream with anything but a fly tied of fur and feathers but lately I’ve gotten nostalgic for that little plastic container I used to carry.  And it’s not because I’ve developed a hankering to fish with bait again, I just miss all the fun I had gathering it. 
 
When my legs got long enough to reach the pedals of a full-sized bicycle, I believed it was a token of my growing sophistication as an angler that I could take off with precious little gear besides my fish pole and a few extra hooks and catch all the trout I wanted with the bait I found along the stream.  There were still damp summer nights when prowling around the neighborhood with a flashlight and an old Maxwell House coffee can was just about as much fun as a young boy was allowed to have but night crawlers weren’t generally the lure of choice when the quarry – brook trout – wasn’t much bigger than the bait.
 
Day in and day out, my all-time favorite bait was a small, soft shelled crab.  I got reasonably proficient at capturing these crustaceans once I realized they always scooted away backwards and that a cupped hand brought up slowly behind them was far more effective than a random stab at their fleeing form.  Using this technique, a half-hour spent cautiously turning over rocks in shallow water produced enough bait to get me through an afternoon of fishing.
 
In the summer there were also crickets (the absolute best bait on sunny days when the water was clear and low) and grasshoppers but you really needed to know when and where to look for them.  Any little meadow area adjacent to a stream could produce a few ‘hoppers for the quick of hand – and foot – but if you wanted any quantity, you had to get out there before the sun made its full appearance and burned the chilling dew off the ground. 
 
Turning over an old discarded board or a loose pile of rocks was almost certain to reveal a few lethargic crickets and, occasionally, hoppers on a cool summer morning.  And believe me, they were worth getting up early for because they could produce the same results as setting a piece of chocolate cake in front of a little boy. 
 
We carried these critters in a glass pop bottle (that was worth a two-cent refund back then) with a whittled down stick jammed in the mouth to prevent their escape.  If you could get anything like a decent drift with one of these morsels on your hook, any trout that saw it was as good as on the stringer. 
 
Despite their rather ferocious mandibles, hellgrammites ranked right up there with crayfish for their fish catching ability, especially when the water was up and roily.  They were never very plentiful on the smallish cricks I fished but they made up for their scarcity with durability.  Properly hooked – through the tough collar around their neck – they would easily stay in place through the landing of three, sometimes even four, fish.
 
We used to joke that when we had a few hellgrammites, we didn’t need fish hooks and if you’ve ever had one of these finger-long, prehistoric looking things sink their mandibles into your finger, you’d understand why.  In their mature state, they’re known as Dobson flies (which are just as ugly looking but they have wings) and they were excellent bait as well but far more difficult for a young boy to catch because they generally hatched after dark and required some form of net to snatch out of the air.
 
Day in and day out, earth worms and stick caddis were the easiest to find and probably accounted for more of the trout I caught than all the rest of the baits combined.  Earthworms could be found in the soft soil of most any stream bank or under nearly any rotting log and stick caddis could be caught by the handful in backwater sections of a stream.
 
I always left the caddis in their little cases until I was ready to fish them and then it was a simple enough matter to peel off a few of the little sticks to expose the whitish larvae inside.  Drifted through a run with the smallest of split shot about a foot up the line, trout – especially brookies - would move quite a distance for these tasty tidbits.  I never felt unprepared when there was nothing else in my little plastic bait container.
 
At one time or another I’ve probably tried – and caught trout on - everything from pollywogs and salamanders to Japanese beetles and tent worms but I always went back to the tried and true when Mom asked me to bring home some fish for dinner.  And were I still roaming the streams looking for something to adorn a bare hook, I wouldn’t hesitate to use any of them.   
 
Nowadays, however, I tie fur and feather creations of most of the things I used to turn over rocks to find and they generally fool the trout about as well as the real McCoy.  But I do miss that little plastic box I carried for so many years (even after I considered myself an honest-to-gosh fly fisherman) because hunting for the bait used to be nearly as much fun as the fishing.