Trout fishers shouldn’t forget their beginnings
I grew up fishing with live bait, catching trout in the upper reaches of Paddy Creek in western Burke County and bream in the large pools in the lower sections, using fat red worms collected from cow patties in the pastures near my home.
I continued fishing exclusively with live bait, primarily night crawlers and red worms, until I was a young adult. Recently out of the U.S. Navy, I was enrolled at Asheville Biltmore College — now the University of North Carolina at Asheville — and was working art-time in the sports department at the Asheville Citizen-Times. Al Geremonte was the paper’s outdoor columnist, and when he learned that I enjoyed fishing, he invited me on a trip to Lake Lure and introduced me to the art of fly fishing. Using popping bugs, we caught scores of bream. Watching them rise to the lure and snagging them was a thrill I had never experienced. And when I graduated to trout fishing with artificial flies that Al had tied, I knew that I would be a life-long fly fisher.
Fishing is one of those rare sports that most anyone can enjoy, regardless of skill level, financial status or social standing. Fly fishing often requires costly gear, but fishing with bait requires only the simplest of gear: a spinning or spincast outfit, small hooks, weights and choice of live bait.
Most kids learn to fish with live bait, and I’ve been using live bait to teach my granddaughters to fish. When they are a little older, I’ll teach them to fly-fish. In the meantime, they’re learning the essentials of trout fishing: where fish are most likely to be in a stream, where and when they’re most likely to feed, what a trout strike feels like, how to hook a trout and how to land them, making the transition to fly fishing much easier.
Dedicated fly fishers often look down their noses at bait fishers, and dedicated bait fishers look up their noses at fly fishers, dubbing them as elitist and snobbish. The primary argument is that bait fishers kill fish, while most fly fishers release their catch. Fishery biologists insist that catch-and-keep fishing within legal limits is no real threat to trout populations in the Appalachians. In western North Carolina, we’re fortunate to have streams dedicated to a variety of fishing preferences, from numerous hatchery-supported waters where live bait is permitted to wild-trout streams that allow only artificial flies. We even have two streams that are designated as wild-trout/natural-bait waters, embracing two polarized styles of fishing.
Although I prefer to fly fish, and I practice catch-and-release most of the time, I do on occasion fish with live bait, especially if I’m craving a dinner of fresh trout. When I fish for meat, I go to hatchery-supported waters. Even then, I catch only enough fish to eat that day. When I’m camping in the backcountry and fishing wild-trout waters, I often will keep a couple of small, wild trout for dinner. The rest I release. The only trout I will not kill is a native brook trout; they’re too beautiful and too precious.
When fishing with live bait, the options are numerous. The most-common live baits are night crawlers and red worms, available at any tackle shop and many grocery stores in the mountains. Wax worms and meal worms are often available, but I prefer the larger worms. You can collect your own red worms and night crawlers from under rocks, rotted logs and rotted leaves.
Another live and deadly bait is a grasshopper. You can purchase worms, but you have to catch your own grasshoppers. They’re usually abundant in grassy fields during the summer, but it takes some effort to catch enough to fish with unless you do as Nick Adams does in Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Nick collects a jar full of grass hoppers from a meadow early in the morning while “they were cold and wet with the dew, and could not jump ….”
Other good live-bait choices are Japanese beetles, june bugs, crickets, caterpillars and spring lizards, which are excellent for catching large brown trout. Larvae from a live wasp nests also are excellent bait — if you don’t mind the risk of getting stung. In late spring, when sourwood trees leaf out, the trees usually are loaded with sourwood worms that devour new leaf growth. Mountain fishers use sourwood worms to catch not only trout, but bass, bream, even walleye. If you have a good supply of sourwood worms, you can catch your limit of just about any fish.
If you’re going to kill a fish to eat, it matters little what you use to catch it. Regardless of how you prefer to fish, an important rule is to not be greedy. Take only what you can eat that day, whether they’re wild trout or hatchery raised. That ensures you will be able to catch trout another day.
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