There have been many innovations since the use of the first fishing lures, including the advent of the many varieties of pork-rind. Probably the use of pork-rinds all came about when some old-timer couldn’t find any fishin’ worms, and turned as a last resort to a strip of thin-sliced bacon. My uncle, an old time fishing guide, swore that the most effective lure in Ozark reservoirs over all seasons was a large jig with a long, slender port-rind eel. Leave that eel off, he told me, and the effectiveness of the jig is reduced considerably. He told about landing a ten-pound bass from Table Rock after the hook pulled free in the last foot or so. The fish fell to a tough pork-rind eel wrapped around the bony structure beneath the gill.
Fishing with him years ago on the War Eagle River in northwest Arkansas, I watched him cut a two-inch long razor-thin strip of white pork-rind to adorn the rear treble of a Flatfish lure. Using a similar deep-running wobbling crankbait, I came up with the idea of two thin strips on two of the three rear hooks. With the lure wobbling through the water, those strips looked like tiny white legs whipping and flagellating behind the lure.
I caught several nice Kentucky and largemouth that day and took the same procedure to Bull Shoals Lake to experience success there. In mid-summer a year or so later, I used the same set-up on a Wiggle-Wart lure to tempt a pair of big smallmouth from an Ozark stream. Almost any deep-running, wobbling lure becomes twice as effective with one or two thin strips of pork rind on rear hooks.
Such thin strips are a favorite too of experienced fly fishermen. At times nothing more is needed for panfish, trout and bass. Fishing the Big Piney as a boy, I was taught by my dad to use small white fly-strip rind, about ¼ inch wide and two to three inches long on a small spinner and jig. We would split the tail of the pork-rind, and the combination was more effective against smallmouth on that little “Shimmy-fly”, than any other lure.
Now there are so many types and colors of frog chunks and rind available that you can’t get them all in your tackle box. But it you had nothing else to fish with, the pork-rind baits would allow you to catch fish almost any time, anywhere.
Black Raspberries
Ol’ dad would just as soon never see another blackberry thicket. In boyhood days back in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, cousins Dave, Darb, Butch and I picked enough blackberries to fill a dump truck. We were forced into the thickets by cruel mothers who saw such outings as social occasions, and canned more blackberries than the fruit cellar would hold.
Back then I didn’t eat many blackberries. A couple of old men in the pool hall said that eating raw blackberries caused appendicitis because of the seeds. I swore back then that when, and if I ever grew up, I’d never be caught in a blackberry patch…unless it was the dead of winter and I was hunting rabbits or quail. But I loved the blackberry pie my daughter Christy baked for me over the Fourth of July weekend. I didn’t have to pick any, just eat the pie. Therefore I got no chiggers!
I only knew one blackberry picker who wasn’t bothered by chiggers. His name was George Halley and George was a professional. He picked blackberries all summer and sold them door-to-door to folks in our rural community. My cousins and I looked up to George. He didn’t take baths, or make his bed, or have a regular job and we figured he had to be the bravest man in the world to wade through a blackberry thicket looking only for berries and no snakes.
He sometimes traded blackberries for home brew, which was one of the local farm products in Big Piney country at that time. Uncle Roy the father of Butch, Dave and Darb made some hisself. Us boys I talked it over an decided that it was the home brew that kept George from being over run by ticks and chiggers, so Butch got a sneaked a pint jar of it from his dads cellar and we medicated ourselves with it. It’s been years, but I can tell you from clear memory that if home brew in the blood won’t kill ticks and chiggers, nothing will!
That experience with alcohol may be the reason I have drink nothing stronger than ice tea and lemonade my whole life-long. In the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if less fortunate souls may not have been steered toward alcoholism by thoughtless mothers bent on hording blackberries.
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