WE’RE BLESSED to live in a time where the wisdom of the world is at our fingertips via the World Wide Web (along with a lot of foolishness, but that’s a topic for another time). This is a story about how I inexplicably employed some old-style information gathering that has allowed me to catch more fish.
Last updated on March 4th, 2025 at 03:20 pm
Small Waters is an occasional feature where we explore the personal side of bass fishing and the pond fishing life. ~ Editor
When I was a kid, fishing meant we were headed to one of two places. (1) A small and winding waterway 10 minutes from the house called Blind River due to the murkiness of the water that made it virtually impossible to see below the surface. Or (2) a small coastal island roughly an hour’s drive south called Grand Isle, with dirty sand beaches littered by fish carcasses and random oil rig debris. Gross, right? Only, when the bite was on, this littered shoreline became a fisherman’s paradise.
While freshwater fishing was fairly consistent on Blind River, saltwater angling at Grand Isle was hit or miss, at least for those of us waist-deep in the surf casting for speckled trout and the occasional catfish, and taking regular breaks to check the crab lines.
Two Lucky Encounters
One trip in particular, when my brothers and I were teens, fell solidly in the “hit” category due to two lucky encounters experienced by my dad.
The first encounter consisted of a conversation with a fellow pipefitter at work who had just returned from a Grand Isle fishing trip and reported that he and the boys “killed ’em” on this new golden spoon-style lure from the Acme Tackle Company called the Sidewinder. Surely, we too could kill ’em on our upcoming trip, Dad thought, with a few of these in our tackle box.
Turns out, knowing the hot new lure and finding the hot new lure were two different things. (It’s not like you could contact the Acme company and have it delivered instantly, Road Runner cartoon-style.) And to complicate matters, Dad’s coworker had given him strict instructions that we would be wasting our time using any size Sidewinder other than the 1/5 ounce. Visits to several bait stores found their shelves overflowing with 1/3-ounce Sidewinders but not a 1/5 to be found. So, guess what we bought?
Our first morning, we gave it our best effort with the 1/3-ouncers, but the stringers attached to our belt loops remained empty.
Now, let’s stop and think about that for a second: It is a disturbing but true fact that my brothers and I spent much of our childhood and teen summers standing waist-deep in the Gulf of Mexico with stringers of struggling speckled trout attached to our lower bodies sending all sorts of signals out into the depths that they were in distress. Shark bait much?
Anyway, that first outing turned out to be a bust, even after we switched to our go-to Speck Rigs. That led Dad to conclude that we needed some bait shrimp to enhance the Speck Rigs’ appeal. He made the executive decision to put up the fishing gear for now and focus on the crab lines. Well, we focused on crab lines, while he set out to find shrimp. A bushel of crabs later, he returned with a small bag of shrimp, a 12-pack of beer, and the fruits of Dad’s second lucky encounter, this time with a shrimp salesman whose brother-in-law happened to have in his bait shop the last three 1/5-ounce Sidewinders on all of Grand Isle.
The hype was true. We caught specks. A lot of them. And that would be a good place to end the story. I could talk about how sometimes the best fishing tips come not from experts on the internet but from random people in the know. The moral of the story would be to keep your eyes and ears open and strike up conversations wherever you go, lest you learn new ways to catch fish.
But Then This Happened
Weeks later, we were on the banks of Blind River when I had a brilliant idea. Those Sidewinders are so good at catching fish, why the heck weren’t we using them all the time? Like now? Stealthily, I crept over to the tackle box, found one of the 1/5-ounce miracle lures, and tied it on. I made a beautiful cast across the river, the reflection from the flying golden spoon so bright that Dad and my brothers stopped fishing to stare. And as it entered the water next to a huge cypress stump, I heard one inquire, “Wait. Is that a …?” the splash ending the sentence before he could.
And then I felt a bump on the line and set the hook. Hard. Right into that cypress stump. And yanked and pulled until the line broke and came springing back at me. Followed by a barrage of complaints: What was I thinking? Not only did I use a saltwater bait in a freshwater river, but I used one of only three Sidewinders we owned. And with the lure’s current popularity among speckled trout fishermen, our prospects of getting another were slim. “You can’t even catch a bass with that!” That last complaint cut deep.
Pause for Dramatic Effect
(The author goes silent for a moment to let the bad memory slowly submerge into the murky depths of Blind River and disappear, for now.)
OK.
It’s Saturday now. I’m a grown man doing the grocery shopping for my wife and daughter, who have duly added their wants and needs to the list I created early in the week. They need shampoo (always), so I turn right at the Walmart greeter and head to the personal care section. After grabbing the shampoo, and something called a facial sponge, I head to sports and outdoors, a straight shot toward the back of the store.
I browse the fishing section nearly every Saturday, though I don’t make a purchase every time. Some people say fishing is VERY expensive, but not the way I do it. I’ll drop 3-4 bucks on a lure that has paid off in the past. (I like to keep a spare.) And I’ll occasionally try out something new. But a packet of hooks and a plastic envelope of go-to soft plastic worms can last me for months or more, a very cost-effective proposition if you ask me.
I notice an old man off in the saltwater section, where I never venture, but I’m not thinking about that right now. My focus this day is on crankbaits, admiring the variety of colors and realistic markings, like tiny pieces of art. “Where the fish at?” I hear a voice ask. I looked over at the man and really “see” him for the first time, rethinking my earlier assessment. Maybe he is an “old man,” but I now must acknowledge that I likely have a few years on him. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the “old man” in the story were he to tell it later.
“In the deepest area of wherever you’re fishing,” I answer, then thinking about the recent rains. “And maybe anywhere there’s moving water.”
He smiles in a way people do when you know they’re about to strike up a conversation. He asks what I fish for and where. I say I like to catch bass, and I mostly fish in our neighborhood pond. He says he hops among several area ponds, mostly at apartment complexes and neighborhoods. And he likes to catch bass, too, along with sac-a-lait, which is good eating, in his opinion.
And then he pulls a chartreuse-colored soft-bait spinnerbait rig from the saltwater fishing rack and says, “I catch ’em all day long on this.” I look closer at the package in his hand and read aloud, “Redfish Magic.”
“You can’t catch a bass with that,” I hear myself say.
He is not offended. “Oh, I don’t worry about what it says; I worry about what it does,” he says. “You use this, I guarantee you’ll catch ’em,” he said, removing a phone from his top pocket, flipping to the camera roll, and swiping through several fish with that very lure stick out of their mouths while counting off the dates and the corresponding numbers of fish. I go to the saltwater display, take one from the rack, and read the small print.
I don’t often make impulse purchases. If it’s not on the list then it must mean you don’t need it. I break that rule today. And thank the man profusely.
That makes him laugh. “Heck, I hope it works for you,” he says. “It will. But even if it don’t, at least you’re fishing. No better way to spend an afternoon.”
The next morning I tied on my Redfish Magic lure and like … magic, the first bass hit on my third cast. I caught that one and two more later Sunday, and followed up midweek with a 3-pounder, and a couple more the following Friday. I called a fishing buddy, who said, yea, he’s caught bass with that lure, adding that he and his brother call it “Cold Front Louie,” because it’ll catch fish when nothing else will.
I’ll be experimenting with this lure, trying it in different conditions and types of weather. I reached out to Google to try to learn more and discovered that Redfish Magic is among a select group of lures considered a good option for both saltwater and freshwater fishing.
Which got me wondering about a certain golden spoon lure and the guilt I felt then and now … and, well, I’ll let Cabela’s give the verdict: “Proven effective by generations of anglers in both freshwater and saltwater, the Acme Sidewinder Spoon produces a darting baitfish-imitating action to hook everything from bass to snapper.”
Blessed, I tell you.
Now excuse me while I go rummage through a few old tackle boxes for one of those Sidewinders.
