Let's Write a Fishing Report

Author’s Note: Out of concern for my personal safety, I feel I must note that none of the following in any way applies to WOJ’s Field Editors.    


     Times are tough, friend. Times are tough. In addition to body parts that protrude, bulge and just generally expand beyond their original limits, my teeth aren’t what they used to be, primarily from years of using them to cut monofilament and squeeze split shot. Once, when I couldn’t find my pocket knife, I even used them to relieve a creek chub of its tail so I could use it for trout bait. So a visit to the dentist was in order, which isn’t all bad, and I’m not talking about the magazine selection. As a rule, dental hygienists are more attractive than, say, mechanics. Mine was very pretty indeed, and such is the male psyche that I tried to chat her up, even with the saliva-sucking machine slushing away in the corner of my mouth.
     “Sho. Come here often?”
     “Yes. I do. I work here.”
     Look up the word “suave” in the dictionary, and there you’ll find a picture of me. I was not to be denied, however, and asked her more questions until in desperation she turned the tables.
     “How about you? Do you have any hobbies?”
     Here I played my trump card. I mean, dental hygienists have to be into dental hygiene, right?
     “Yesh. I love to flosh.”
     (long whistling sound followed by an explosion)
     Well, I was troubled by her reaction for awhile, which tied in to the fact that I had just turned 40. “Maybe I just don’t have it any more,” I thought.  
    “Cheer up,” well-meaning friends said. “They say 40 is the new 30” (By extension, 100 is the new 90. Which I’m guessing isn’t much consolation.)
     I felt better for a little while, but then the mid-life doubts returned.
     “40,” I thought to myself. “I need a new racket. No more slogging away, working for the Man, hoping to drag my tired old bones through life until my pittance of a 401(k) kicks in. What I need is a job that requires a minimum of work for which I am not held personally accountable.”
     My friend, I have achieved Paradise, and you can, too.

Let’s Write a Fishing Report!
     Think about it: What other job has such an array of excuses already built in? “Shoulda been here last week” and “Cold front shut ‘em down” are just two examples. And if someone confronts you about a ruined vacation centered around a fishing report which you’ve written, you can say, “Not that Long Lake. I meant the Long Lake two sections west.” By the time your reader discovers that there is no Long Lake two sections west, you’ll be in a tavern far away, having a burger and a beer. But there are certain truisms that will make your life as a profiler of hotspots much easier. “Fish around green weeds” is a classic that is about as obvious as saying “Target your efforts in water,” but people eat it up anyway. The same goes for, “If you don’t catch anything, keep moving until you find active fish.” This seems self-apparent, but it has proven to be a much better philosophy than its predecessor: “Stay in One Place Until Your Bones Moulder and Yea Even Time Itself Passeth Into Dust.”
     While the above chestnuts will help you in your budding career as an outdoor writer, it would be unethical to write a fishing report without doing actual fieldwork. Fieldwork allows you to keep a finger on the pulse of the Wisconsin outdoors, which is important (in a competitor to WOJ, I once read a report which detailed declining ice conditions on a particular lake. The ice was, in fact, poor. It had been gone for six weeks.) Fieldwork also lets you get out and associate with the “little people” who are your eyes and ears. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re driving through a park in Oshkosh. It’s a nice spring day, and you decide to take a walk along the lakefront. While on your walk you encounter an old man who is sitting on a dock, mumbling. Now, it’s likely that he said, “I think I’ve got the lumbago.” But can you, with absolute certainty, rule out the possibility that he might in fact have said, “I’ve been tearing them up on Winnebago”? No, you cannot. In the report it goes.
The Power of Decimals, and the Devil is in the Details
     Let’s say you’re acquainted with a guy at work who likes to hunt ducks. He’s got a spot on Lake Poygan, and every Monday morning during the waterfowl season he comes in and says, “Got my limit of greenheads again.” What happens after awhile is that you don’t believe him. But it’s different if he says, “Shoulda been out yesterday. I got a greenhead, a widgeon, and two ringnecks.” Variety lends credibility. I don’t know why that is, but it applies to fishing as well. O.K., you’re writing a report about the DePere Dam on the Fox River just below Green Bay. The walleyes there can be truly massive: eight pounds, thirteen pounds, nine hundred pounds, blah, blah, blah. The numbers all sort of run together after awhile, and glaze your readers’ eyes. But if you write, “Eight-year old Kurt Manske of Mishicot caught a 14.3-pound monster below the DePere Dam on a chartreuse Fuzz-E-Grub,” I guarantee that on the weekend all of northeastern Wisconsin will be at the DePere Dam, pitching chartreuse Fuzz-E-Grubs. All of Mishicot will be there, too, and they’ve never even heard of Kurt Manske. What happened? The “point-three” got ‘em.
     In the same manner it’s important to throw in an oddball bait every now and then in order to lend an air of authenticity to your report. Muskie fishermen chuck plugs and bucktails and swimbaits, and everyone knows it. In that light, “Al Hendricks of Boulder Junction caught a 50-inch lunker on a Suick” isn’t news. Al catching the same fish on a teardrop tipped with a waxworm is, and some enterprising writer (me) will make a mint churning out articles with titles like “Fishing’s Frontier: Teardrops for Lockjawed Muskies.”
     Well, grasshopper, I wish you the best of luck with your new career, and maybe I’ll see you on the water. I hear they’ve been tearing them up on Winnebago.