Breakaway Adventures: Why Do We Fish?
Breakaway Adventures: Why Do We Fish?
Mark Your Calendars for NY’s FREE Fishing Days
Aedan is all smiles with his nice bass! Photo/Indrek Kongats
A very famous person, the writer of maybe the most significant western novel of all time, the American Classic Riders of the Purple Sage, was equally well known for his worldly adventures in Sportfishing!
Zane Gray once wrote about himself, “If I fished only to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.” Fishing is life itself, as we are always fishing for something!
New York State has long supported and emphasized the important role fishing has in our society and why everyone should have the opportunity to discover this for themselves by setting days aside when anyone and everyone can go fishing for free regardless of age and where you call home!
June 29th and June 30th are two days to mark on this summer’s calendar and make plans to take yourself, a spouse, a friend or a child out and discover why fishing is more than just about catching fish.
I am continually impressed how western New York is so significant in many aspects of our daily lives with most of us not even being aware of it. For instance, when I and most other people of my generation or older think about fishing, we don’t think about Bass Pro Shops or Ranger Boats or even Orvis or L.L. Bean; for those of us that fly fish, we think about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Someone by the name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, more familiar to everyone as Mark Twain, was responsible in painting this image of Huck and Tom sneaking off to the river bank with their cane poles, not just to catch fish but to dream about life and adventure, and of course to escape from whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence.
Mark Twain now rests in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, hometown of his wife, Olivia Langdon, where they as a family spent many summers. Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the home of his in-laws, Quarry Farm, one of those western New York summers, I am sure, after a trip with family fishing on the Chemung River - most likely a model of Tom and Huck’s mighty Mississippi that runs into the 444-mile-long Susquehanna River and eventually ending up in Chesapeake Bay.
Quarry Farm became to be known as “The Mark Twain Study” which has since been relocated to the campus of Elmira College. Quarry Farm was recently named a New York State literary landmark by the Library of Congress affiliate, the United for Libraries and the Empire State Center for the Book.
Several quotes associated to Mark Twain reference fishing, “When you fish for love, bait your heart not your brain”, “Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish”!
A passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn best sums up why we go fishing in the first place and how to do it properly… “We catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn. Drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs and looking up at the stairs, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night or the next, nor the next.”
Locally there are many great family-friendly places to go fishing including: Red House and Quaker Lakes in the Allegany State Park; the Allegheny River that eventually joins the Mississippi before dumping into the Gulf of Mexico; the Cattaraugus Creek; immerse yourself with a float through the Zoar Valley; just east of Ellicottville, in neighboring Franklinville, is Case Lake; and in Farmersville there is Harwood Lake, to name a few.
Make the moment even more enjoyable and go on the cheap, a garage sale fiberglass rod and reel outfit is all that you’ll need, a bobber made from the cork of an old wine bottle, and of course a can of worms, picked not bought, will round out an outfit the would be the envy of Tom and Huck for sure!
The real secret or the key to attract those lunkers is to literally find an old tarnished key from an old forgotten lock, shine it up and attach it to your fishing line just 6 to 8 inches above your bait. Jig your line every once in a while to make it flash and hold on!
To make Tom and Huck proud, you will have to dress the part as well, an old straw hat, sleeveless shirt and some cutoff jeans. I’m sure they fished barefoot to boot.
Curt Gowdy, a very famous sportscaster, worldwide fly fisherman but most notably the host and the voice of the long passed American Sportsman, best sums up his expectations, “Whether I caught fish or not, just the thrill of rolling out the line and watching my fly turn over has been good enough for me. That and the hundreds of treasured memories I have of this wonderful sport.”
So, whether you live in Cattaraugus County, in New York State, in the USA or Canada, on June 29-30 you have no excuse but to leave your troubles and daily stresses behind, treat yourself and anyone you know to a day of just catching up with the meaning of life and wait for a tug on the line! Above all put a smile on someone’s face!
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Indrek Kongats is an artist, traveler, outdoorsman, and business owner residing in Ellicottville. He operates River Dog Art Gallery in Houghton, NY, and his Breakaway Classic Adventures specializes in adventure travel destinations. Learn more about him at breakawayclassicadventures.com.