What's this for?

Not so much about wire lining but seeing the reel itself brought back some neat memories for me.

I spent most of my pre-teen and early teenage years fishing in deep south Texas. My friends and I would spend entire summers exploring and fishing the different local resacas (ox bow lakes left behind from the wanderings of the Rio Grande). Fences were just an inconvience, and every body of water was a new adventure. There was nothing we could not catch with a pole and a castnet. I think my tackle box had a popping cork, a small pack of assorted hooks, a dial-a-weight container of split shots, a knife (usually from moms bread drawer) and 3 lures (a spinner bait, a spoon and small green mirror lure).

One day we ran into some friends who were leaving a large resaca on a golf course. Carrying a rod snapped in half, they told an epic tale about a large alligator gar that destroyed their gear. My friend and I got excited and went to the area they had been fishing. There at the end of an apartment complex next to an impenetratable wall of prickly pear cactus and brambles, was an underground pipe that caused a large circular current. The water spun out from under some trees across the surface. We sat there messing around rigging up our rods when this huge gar came up to gulp air. The head was huge and just the fins were larger than most of the bass we routinely caught. This was the largest fish we had ever seen and we got really excited.

I figured that alligator gar must eat small fish so I get out the castnet and start hunting along the shoreline for bait. It was frustrating work but after snagging on all kinds of trees and roots, and cleaning out tons of algea from the net, I eventually catch a mullet. We decide to rig my buddies rod up because he has 15 lb test and I only have 12 on my reel. So with the heaviest leader we have (one of those blue mono rigs with red beads and such) our largest hook and a pyramid sinker he lobs our offering into the strongest part of current. We didn't play the waiting game too well, and after a short period of time we wedged the rod in tree and start horsing around. I can't remember what we did, but what is important is that when we came back to rod nothing had happend. The rod was still in the tree and the line seemed to be exactly where we left it.

So imagine our surprize when we reel in and discover that the leader was cut and even the sinker had been ripped out of the snap. We were out of time and had to leave, but we started to plan for our next trip over the next coulpe of weeks.

Our gear was clearly not adequate so we pooled our resources and purchased the biggest reel we could afford;A PENN 49L. Spooled with 100 lb test mounted on a broom stick fiberglass rod we knew this gar was going down. Nobody told us we wouldn't be successful, but everyone from our parents to the tackle store salesmen thought we were crazy. We got some steel leaders, huge treble hooks and several large bank sinkers. The last part of the equation was securing some bait.

I learned early on that bait can be easy to catch in some places and impossible catch in others. It doesn't mean that the fishing is better at one place or the other, but that you can make you life easier if you catch bait in one place and use it in another. So with a little finageling, my dad took us bay fishing the evening before our adventure and we stocked up on whiting.


Damn it's late, I will finish this latter if anybody wants me to (not up to ole GS's standards but I figured somebody here might enjoy it)