Keeping it Simple | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Keeping it Simple | Previous Challenge Entry
By Susan martin
02/07/07
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My dad was a very simple man and he lived a very simple life. When my dad would do anything, he would find an easy way to do it. His thinking was why should we spend so much time making up fancy and complicated ways of doing things when we could get the same results with less fuss.

One of my dad’s favorite past times after we moved from New York to California was going fishing, prior to that he had never even seen a fishing pole. Since my dad wanted to find something fun that we could do as a family, he went down to a local sporting goods store and decided fishing would be the ideal sport for him to teach his three daughters.

My dad never bought those do-it-yourself books, he told us that fish weren’t interested in how fancy a set up you had on your line or using the most expensive bait or lure. He used the same line set up whether he took us ocean fishing off the Malibu Pier, or off the shore of Lake Shasta. Just a swivel tied to the fishing line, with a small weight, and then a light liter line with a treble hook tied to the end of that and either a worm or salmon eggs.

People were always amazed at how many fish we would bring in using this method, they just couldn’t figure it out, how a line so simplified could bring in such good sized trout. My dad also explained that the less you handled the bait, the better your chances of catching fish, because they had a good sense of smell.

Now I don’t know if everything my dad taught me about fishing was true or not, but my dad worked a lot of hours, so the times that we spent fishing were the best times of my life growing up. Getting to spend those few precious hours just me and my dad standing on the shore of the lake watching the sun come up in the early morning hours, are the few memories that I have of my dad before he passed on a few years ago.

I taught my daughters how to fish when they were growing up and passed down the same simple way to set up their fishing poles and how to handle the bait as little as possible and we are still doing the best fishing. I also passed down to my children the important lesson my dad taught me and my sisters: it doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to work.

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