I was doing yard work on Saturday morning when the weedeater scared a cricket out from between a couple of bricks. Hayden and Luke were playing in the yard nearby, so I told Luke to grab his fishing pole. Hayden came to see what I had. When Luke returned with his Spiderman pole, she went into hysterics and demanded that we let the cricket go. "No, he's bait." With huge tears rolling from her eyes, she screamed, "You kill everything!" over and over at me until I finally sent her inside. I put the cricket on the hook, dropped it into the little hole behind my neighbors' and handed the pole to Luke. I could see his line take off, so I told him to reel up. He pulled up a nice little chub. Cool. We dropped it back in and I went back to work.
Not much later, I opened up our little storage shed in the back and 3 more crickets scampered for cover like I had just yanked the curtain open on their changing room. Luke was still close by, so I gave him a bait container and put him on the hunt. The boy was in heaven. He secured all 3 of those crickets and then walked around the yard listening for more. He found another 3 under the neighbors' trash can. Hayden intercepted us one more time on the way to the creek and was about to start up again when I asked if she wanted to try fishing with one. This changed everything. She was all about it. Of course, she wanted to keep anything that she caught for pets.
The crickets didn't stay on the hook too well, but the chubs sure did like them. We caught half a dozen of them, putting two into an old coffee container filled with creek water for Hayden. While we were at it, I figured that I might as well get my own bait bucket and put these guys to good use. Luke sniffed out a few more crickets in my neighbors' yard and I had 8 nice chubs in the bucket before our supply ran out. Apparently, chubs love crickets but they affect them like a pizza with extra anchovies hits most of us. I opened the bucket the next day to change out the water and was puzzled to find it full of floaties. I knew that I had given them clean water just the night before. A closer look revealed that the bucket was filled with tiny cricket parts. They turned out to be a bad idea all the way around for those poor chubs.
I carried the pager for work last weekend, so I've got a free day off this week. I'm planning a 20 hour marathon on the river from 4:00 AM on Friday until midnight or 1:00 the next morning. Flatties are said to get active in the hours just before light and I've never targeted them at this time of day, so I'm going to go test the theory. An old friend is going to join me for a few hours while I'm out. I don't know if the flatties will show up, but I do know that I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. Hopefully the river fish are hungry for creek chubs with heart burn.
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