Fishing stories: The great bait debate

My aunt’s husband, Dell, was a tall, lanky Rasta man with dreadlocks that fell the length of his back. He was talking eagerly with Paul, a new friend of my mother’s who happened to have a small dinghy that he kept on the beach where we were all lounging on a hot summer day.

“All right, fine,” I heard Paul say, before he looked at me. “Do you want to go fishing, Shannon?”

“Sure!” I answered, and followed him to a spot on the beach where the dinghy lay overturned and chained to a tree. I had never gone fishing out of a boat before, only on the edges of freshwater lakes in California where I grew up, and there I only caught trout. When I was a kid, I’d found that the best bait was cheese, so I ran to a cooler and luckily found a block of sharp cheddar to my liking. I was sure that this fishing trip was going to be something new and exciting.

Paul and I dragged the boat to the water and got in, and Dell ran up and jumped in with a tackle box that smelled awful. As Paul pulled out two paddles and instructed me to help him row out, Dell opened his tackle box to reveal three rolls of fishing line, some hooks, pieces of lead, and a package of pink squishy…meat? I asked about the latter.

“Squid, for bait,” Dell said simply.

“I brought my own bait,” I said, very proud of myself, and pulled the cheese out of my pocket.
Paul stopped rowing to look, and he and Dell began laughing. They laughed so hard that the boat began to rock and threaten to overturn.

“What?” I asked.

“You can’t fish with cheese! Fish don’t eat cheese!” Dell said.

“I’ve caught lots of fish with cheese!” I replied.

“Suit yourself,” said Paul, and he continued rowing to a spot near a rocky place on the shore. He and Dell put the hooks and lead onto the lines, and squeezed the nasty, slippery squid into place on their hooks. They handed me my line and watched with amused smiles as I molded a ball of cheddar cheese onto the hook.

“We’ll see how much fish you catch with that,” Dell commented. I just smiled, but inwardly, I was wondering if the salt water, or the salt water fish, made fishing with cheese less effective. As I let my line sink into the water and pondered this, I immediately felt a pull on my rod.

“Shannon! Pull it in, you’ve got something!” Paul yelled with a laugh.

The fish was red with spots…a Hein, they call it here. I had caught the first fish! The men were astonished. They felt bites soon after, and this gave them the confidence to bet that I wouldn’t catch as many fish as them, but as they pulled the hooks out of the mouths of their catches, I felt another bite on my proud, cheese-baited line. Another Hein, and I would catch one more before the end of our trip, and three would be the same number of fish caught by each of my fellow fishermen.

As we returned from fishing and pulled into shore, my mother admired our catch and mentioned the mysterious disappearance of the cheese from the cooler. The three of us just laughed.