Text version of the episode:
Episode 18: Fishing
My Dad is a fisherman. Not by trade, by trade he is actually a quality assurance manager. But, his favorite hobby before riding bikes, and painting, and listening to music, is definitely fishing.
I love fishing – I honestly have done it in probably a decade, but I still love it.
I grew up in a tiny town of 40,000 people called Lompoc, California. It's basically a suburb of Santa Barbara, which is really just a suburb of Los Angeles, but LA is a three hour car drive south from Lompoc. It's in the hills where now they grow some of the best Pinot Noir in the world, but where when I was a kid was just green in the spring and hay yellow the rest of the year. When you drive from Lompoc to Santa Barbara, there’s about half a dozen spots you can either park and fish off a pier, or climb down some rocks of cliffs and fish right on the beach into the ocean. We did both – I feel like when it was warmer, my Dad would go fishing almost every weekend.
The night before, on Friday, when we weren’t at church and wouldn’t have service the following Saturday, my dad would disappear into the garage and I’d find him organizing his tackle box. There were hundred thousand little compartments and trays with separations, and in each one you could find something. There would be hooks, or pre tied knots, or little findings that attach two parts of a fishing line together when you wanted to fix with two hooks instead of just one, or little 1, 2 or 5 ounce weights that you put at the end of the line so it casts out into the ocean further, and sits on the ocean floor and drags along the bottom as you reel the line back in.
Dad would look at my sibling and I and he would say, “I’m going to go fishing tomorrow, do you want to come?” And we’d nod, and be excited, and he would say “Okay, but you have to wake up reeealllly early, when it’s still gonna be dark.” And we’d be so excited, or maybe actually sometimes we weren’t really sure if we wanted to go with him as we got older, but, when we were little we’d be excited. I remember one time, I wanted to get as much sleep as possible and still wake up in time to go with him, so I slept in my fishing clothes. A baggy pair of jeans, a tee shirt, a jacket and a beanie and socks and shoes, and I laid in the bed in a pool of sweat until morning came.
My Dad would peak in the room and I would pop up, immediately awake, and help him put the tackle boxes in the trunk and load up the car with like camping chairs and some buckets in case we caught a fix, and try like a puzzle to fit the fishing rods into the truck without having to unfasten them apart too much - fishing poles come in little aluminum sections that you fit together and have good amount of bend in them.
One of the best parts of going fishing was that we’d get to stop at the bait shop on the way out of town. It was really just a liquor store that has a deep freezer in the front thats full of frozen bait like squid, and little tiny shrimp, and fish eggs and I feel like sometimes I would see chicken wings? I don’t know, I was a kid. And worms! There were like six types of worms, like big juicy earthworms and little tiny red squirmy looking worms, and there was shrimp, and my dad would pick something he thought the fish would eat, and we would get to buy some chips and some cookies and just a few snacks to eat so we wouldn’t be too hungry at the beach. Sometimes we’d make peanut butter jelly sandwiches too but they always always got sand in them. At least chips, you can’t tell the difference in the crunch.
We’d drive out to one of a dozen places, and lug everything out of the car and set up camp, and watch my Dad rig the lines with bait and we’d stand there in a row, sometimes all three of us and cast out into the ocean like 20 to 50 feet and just watch the waves roll in, and wait for the line to jerk just a little bit, the feeling of a fish biting the bait. And then you’d JERK IT, and set the hook, and reel it in and see what was on the other side.
