You use to fish for what????

My Uncle Vaughn sent me this picture today in a text message. The message simply read "going fishin", but I already knew what he was up too when I saw the picture. You see these little tasty treats that you see on the plate are strawberry dough balls and they are used to catch big monster carp! Did you just say carp? Yep I did!

When I was a kid, my grand-parents had a lake house at Lake Sinclair. It was a pretty little place on one of the coves off of the main body of water. If we still had it today, it would be worth a lot of money, but back then it was just a great place to go skiing on the weekend and do a bit of fishing. The fish of choice was big golden carp. My Grand-Daddy, Doc Luckie, would go up on Wednesday and throw out a bunch of meal cakes off of the dock and bait the fish up for the weekend. They would always be there waiting for us to pull them in all day. We would fill up a freezer in a weekend and Grand-Daddy would take them back to Marshallville to give them to his farm hands. They would grind them up and make something like salmon patties out of the meat. I never ate one, but I sure did catch my share. They were fun to catch because they fought hard and always had good size to them. Doc even held the record on the lake for biggest carp caught at one time or another. All of us fished. The men, the women, the kids, everyone. I would wake up fishing and fish until I went to bed at night. It really was a lot of fun.

Now back to the picture. Grand-Daddy found a recipe in an outdoor magazine for these dough balls that you see. He always used strawberry jello because he said that it had the strongest scent. It really is nothing more than a ball of dough with onions and strawberry jello, but those carp love 'em. You take the dough ball and mold it around your hook. Attach a slip cork and chunk it in the lake. Let the bait sink to the bottom and sit back and be patient. I learned a lot about fishing by fishing for carp. I learned to watch my cork and let the fish really take the bait before I set the hook. You see a carp will sit there and suck on that ball for a while before he will actually pick it up to where you can hook him. All the while your cork is twitching and bobbing up and down. I can still hear Grand-Daddy telling me to let him have it, let him have it, let him have it, them BAM!!! Set the hook as hard as you can!! I'm a hard hook setter to this day because of that.

Grand-Daddy died in 1997. I still miss him today. He was a great outdoors man, farmer, husband, father, and Grand father. My Dad will probably tell you that he misses shooting doves with him the most. My Uncle probably misses deer hunting with him the most, but I miss fishing with him the most. He was always teaching me to be a better fisherman. A lot of times it would be just him and me out on that dock with our bait in the water. I cherish those times and realize how lucky I was to have a Grand Daddy like Doc!

"When you set that hook, you jerk his teeth out boy!"

I love you Grand Daddy!