A group of teens heading to a local golf course lake early one Monday morning elicited curiosity.
What exactly is going on here? Is this a high school team going out to practice? A free fishing day? An organized event? The Daily Limit wanted to know, so park the car and go find out.
“We get dropped off at the golf course, and we get to fish because the course is closed,” said 15-year-old Josh Rowe. “We just try to catch a bunch of bass.”
Rowe was among the 10 or so youth from the same high school who load up backpacks, a couple rods, tackle, snacks and water to spend their morning plying ponds dotting the course. They said they’d been doing it for around two years with permission from the country club.
“It’s pretty good fishing — they’re all about a 1 and 1/2 to 2, 3 pounds,” said Rowe, whose best from the main lake was a 5-pounder that bit a watermelon seed finesse worm. “My dad took me fishing since I was really little. I’ve just loved it my whole life.”
Elliot Easterly and Andrew Coleman were alongside Rowe. Easterly was throwing a swimbait with a Lew’s Orange Mach Crush baitcaster he bought after seeing a YouTube video describing how smooth the reel works.
“Sometimes we’ll do competitions out here if we’re catching them good,” Easterly said. “Sometimes we do most fish, and then have portable scales.
“If we do most fish, we’ll bass fish a little bit until we’re losing, then Andy and I go to another pond and they have a lot of little bream and we go catch a bunch.”
The boys, who all live in nearby neighborhoods, said they kind of took Rowe’s lead. He talked up bass fishing at school — “We’d skip out on science notes and talk about fishing.”
“I did used to fish a lot, but Josh got me back into it,” Coleman said. “Two summers ago, and we started doing this and we did it after school during the year.”
Just a drop in the bucket
It was heartening to see the next generation of anglers enjoying the pastime. They might not go on to fish tournaments as adults, but that doesn’t really matter. The boys are among the 11.6 million youth counted in the 49 million Americans who fish recreationally each year.
Fishing is the second-most popular activity in the U.S. after jogging, and it’s an economic juggernaut. Almost $50 billion is spent annually on fishing gear and trips, according to data compiled by the American Sportfishing Association.
The ASA also reported numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which for the first time examined the impact of outdoor recreation on our nation’s economy. The bureau said outdoor recreation accounted for 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2016, when it actually grew at a slightly faster rate than the overall economy.
The youth probably are on the low end of the estimated $1,441 spent annually by the typical angler. Yet that trickle, like Easterly’s purchase at Southern Reel, contributes to the 828,000 jobs supported by fishing that generate $35 billion in salary and wages each year. Fishing’s overall impact on the economy, with the money moving through other hands, is $115 billion, and anglers contribute $1.5 billion annually toward conservation.
As the ASA prepares for its big show of the year, ICAST, it can take stock in the fact that freshwater fishing participants have increased 11 percent since 2011, which includes these boys. At ICAST, speakers at the State of the Industry Breakfast, will have something to crow about.
Fawning all over the place
It’s baby deer season across much of the country, but sometimes the wobbly-legged fawns need a little help. Angler liaison for B.A.S.S., Steve Bowman, found that out last week — twice.
As a deputy sheriff, he was manning a john boat near lowlands along the Arkansas River, helping out anyone — and anything — that needed assistance.
“I saw something on this high area, I thought it was a beaver or nutria,” said Bowman, former outdoor editor at the state newspaper and an Arkansas Outdoors Hall of Fame inductee. “When I got close I could see it was a deer, and it ran right to us and hopped in the boat.”
Bowman said he looked around and finally spotted the momma, and let the fawn off near her on a large area of high ground.
Then, while heading to church Sunday morning, he encountered another fawn in distress. This one would need rescuing twice.
First leaving their rural driveway, he and wife, Barbara, saw a doe and fawn cross their path on the road. When they didn’t see the fawn emerge from a creek bed, Barb asked that he go back and check. It was stuck in a deep ditch, and Steve climbed down and helped it out.
“They can barely walk at that age. It probably was barely a week old,” he said.
Then it crossed a deeper small ravine and again didn’t come out. By this time they turned around again and as they passed saw the fawn was stuck in a wad of roots. So Steve got out again, freed its leg and sent it on to mom, which Barb videoed and posted on social media.
Others have posted similar interactions recently, but what are the odds that that any one person encounters two foundering fawns in within days?