When I was a kid all I ever fished with was live bait.  On the way to the fishing hole Dad would take us by the bait shop to pick up whatever our target fish was fond of.

We would fill our bucket with minnows for White Perch.  A cardboard cylinder of chirping crickets guaranteed a stringer full of Bream.  Night Crawlers packed with soil in an old ice cream container meant Large Mouth Bass was on the menu.  Lastly, a tub of the nastiest puree to ever come out of a blender; a combination of pig blood, old cheese, and rotted meat fished off the bottom of the pond on a big treble hook would have Catfish as big as me flopping around inside the boat in no time.

Every cast was filled with anticipation because there were only two outcomes, either you caught the fish or the fish took your bait.

Somewhere along the line artificial bait entered the picture and things were never the same.  I haven’t had to recapture an escaping cricket or wrestle a Shad out of a minnow bucket since before I learned to drive.  This changed on my last fishing trip to the coast.

As I planned my trip to Grand Isle, Louisiana during a time when the moon, tides, and wind were squarely against me; I had to turn to live bait to save the trip.  When the fish are biting they seem to bite anything.  A blade of sea grass or a plummeting piece of Gull poop might elicit an explosive, surface breeching strike.  When the fish are apathetic and sluggish you have to bring the good stuff.

At the marinas and roadside stalls along Louisiana’s highway 1 the good stuff is going to cost you .25 cents a piece for live shrimp, and a dollar a piece for Cocahoe or Croaker minnows.  This is where the casting net comes in.

There has been a casting net in the back of the truck for as long as I can remember.  It has sat in the corner in its original packaging just waiting for times to get hard enough for me to actually read the directions.  That casting net finally found the glory it was meant for.

Things didn’t start well.  I read half of the instructions, as I’m prone to do, and decided I would figure it out in a few throws.  The first cast looked more like a trapezoid than the perfect sphere I created in my mind.  As every weight on the net rattled off my head or wrist I was encouraged to revisit the instructions.  It seems I was holding the net upside down, inside out, and in the wrong hand.

The next cast took on kind of a half moon shape and only a third of the weights slapped my wrist.  I actually caught something though, two minnows and a nice sized shrimp.  I was in business.  My second throw with a casting net in my life and I had already netted 2 dollars and 25 cents.

Over the next 30 minutes I caught more than enough bait for the afternoon.  I had eliminated the middle man and taken a big step toward becoming a self-sufficient fisherman.  My spastic display also entertained a sizeable crowd at the dock, I love giving a little something back to the people.  I can’t wait to try the casting net for fresh water minnows as well.  Here’s to learning something new.

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