Searching for Treasure

 

Photo of my treasures from last week shows the 5 lures… each of which sell for $12 to $16  new.  The 7-foot Penn graph rod and Shakespear Microcast reel costs about  $125 new. To a man who uses a sassafras hand-made boat paddle, the aluminum paddle is fairly worthless

I am a beachcomber, I reckon.  Didn’t know what that was until I saw it in a magazine the other day.  About 4 or 5 years ago I was in Canada on Lake of the Woods fishing for Walleye, Bass, Pike, Crappie and Yellow Perch.  I’m like that in Canada; the fishing is up and down beneath the boat… no casting.  You just find 25 to 30 feet of water and bob a jig or a minnow up and down off the bottom until something grabs it and then you put whatever you can net into the live well and put on a new minnow.  

It might not suit a lunker-buster to fish that way, but it suits me just fine. I usually intend to eat what I catch, that night back in the cabin that my friend and lodge owner, Tinker Helseth lets me stay in.  But if you go out on that huge lake all day and feed the eagles and catch a bunch of fish and take a couple of naps in your boat, you get the urge to try something else. So what I do is, I get out on one of the many sandbars where there are drifts behind the sand beach, and I look for wolf tracks or moose tracks, and real beautiful driftwood and granite stones that are really pretty.  And that one day amongst the drifts, I came across a big musky lure that was nearly a foot long.  After that, I started looking for musky lures at various beaches and found about a dozen.  

I took them to a bait and tackle shop at Nestor Falls and the owner’s eyes lit up.  Three of them were antiques.  The rest sold in his shop for $20 to $30 each.  He gave me $100 for the 3 antique lures and offered me $15 each for 8 others.  Why the heck I refused his offer I don’t know!  Today they hang on the wall with a thousand other lures in my basement, and I don’t know what to do with them except take them back to Canada and use them to fish for muskies, or maybe here in the Ozarks for stripers and hybrids.  Actually, next September I might use them to try to catch one of those muskies stocked in Pomme de Terre Lake.  

But if I had been smart enough to accept his offer I would have made $220 in two hours of beach-combing.  I am looking forward to going back and visiting Tinker again this spring and finding new beaches.  To heck with the walleye, I have caught a million of them!

The muskie lures I found in Canada… the two on the right side may be quite valuable.  The first is a jointed Rapala, made in Finland, with a silver metal lip- said to be a sea-surf fishing lure.  Can’t even be found on internet.  The second from left is a bucher depth-raider. Likely one of the first made, with a lip not found on newer made Bucher lures and again not found on the internet. The remaining ones here are more modern-day lures which sell for $25 to $30 in Canada

 

Now lets skip to the day before Thanksgiving when I took my boat and traveled to one of my favorite lakes about an hour away.  There is a taxidermist in South Dakota who told me he would buy a whole truckload of driftwood from me if I would bring it to him when I go up to Nebraska in December hunting ducks.  That’s what I was going after that day, and I found a bunch of what he wanted. But I also found everything in the first photo above... five lures averaging $14 new, the 7ft. Penn graph rod and reel about $125 new and an aluminum paddle who I guess to some is worth something. But I use sassafras.

Dozens of found usable lures are on my wall in a basement workshop. Among these are about 40 antiques.  The most valuable are wooden, with glass eyes.  Some of them I have never seen before

When I lived in Arkansas years ago, I would fish on Bull Shoals for hours, and then comb the banks for fishing lures.  In time I found many antique lures and several hundred other lures that had been lost by fishermen and floated up to the high water line.  

        Today I have boxes of those lures, most needing new hooks.  So I do that still, and the day before Thanksgiving I found five nearly new lures, one of which was an original ‘whopper plopper’ which sells in tackle stores for ten bucks or more.  I easily had $50 worth of lures when I came across an aluminum boat paddle, one of those with a yellow blade, worth 30 dollars or so.   Next I found a good life jacket on the other side of the cove, and an hour later a brand spanking new rod and reel that I would figure to be worth $75.  

I know it is hard to believe this, but in 1982, when I was living down in north Arkansas,  Jack Leslin, a top notch professional woodcarver from Rockford, Illinois, told me he would give me a thousand dollars for a pickup load of cedar driftwood off of Bull Shoals Lake.  I spent a couple of days getting just what he wanted and found a place where there were beautiful rocks along the shoreline.  On a whim, I loaded the bed of my pickup with those rocks.  It only took about 3 hours to take them from my boat to my pickup. Then I loaded Jack Leslin’s driftwood on top of the rocks.  After I unloaded the driftwood in northern Illinois, I drove to Davenport Iowa where there was an aquarium wholesaler and told him I would sell him those rocks, perfect for aquariums.  We haggled over his offer for a while, then met in the middle.  He bought those rocks, about 200 of them, for $800!!

You can see why I have such a hard time sitting at my desk writing.  The lakes beckon me.  I fish them, hunt ducks and deer and turkeys on them, and find the peace and solitude I seek in the woods above the water.  I am a writer, a fisherman, a hunter, a naturalist, and a beachcomber!!!