The Brownspur Swimming Hole is THE place to be in the summertime, but summertime only lasts for May through September, to stretch it as far as we can.  

Every Mother’s Day weekend is usually when we pump it out, rake it out, clean it out, of everything that has accumulated during the October through April cycle, when it is generally too cold to swim.

Once it is adjudged as clean by the Lady of the Household, we fill it up and treat it with about eight pounds of chlorine a week during swimming season, to keep it clean and critter-free (actually, the bullfrogs stay in it, but they turn blue). But once October gets here, I put up the chlorine, and whatever gets in it is free to stay if they want to, until I crank up the relift pump the next May.

Therefore, we accumulate a pretty fair captive population of assorted fish that get in from somewhere – some say from fish eggs clinging to the legs of the waterbirds that call on a regular basis.  

Whatever, they get their water pumped out from beneath them, and are raked out, or chlorined fatally then pumped out toward the end of the clean-out process, so that we start our swimming in fish-free water.

But with the threat of the 2011 Flood possibly re-filling a pumped-out Swimming Hole, we didn’t get ready to pump this year until early June, and lo and behold, the bream or pond perch therein had started bedding!

The grandboys were coming out for the day, and I asked their parents to include Sir’s fishing gear – a Lightning McQueen spin-cast rod and reel which actually turned out to work well.

I also had rigged my fly rod with a little black dropper fly – this wasn’t really fair, for the water was so clear that we could see the bream beds (of course, that meant the bedding bream could also see us, so maybe it evened out).

Sir, at four and a half, had practiced his casting skills during spring visits, and could generally whack one of the duck decoys floating in the water. I tied on a beetle-spin, warned him about hooking Little Brother or his Grunk, and pointed out a likely bed for his first cast.  

He laid it just on the other side of the bed and reeled the lure across it, whereupon the mama bream whacked the intruder.

Sir felt the jolt; “I got one!” he yelled, echoed by Nil a second later: “He got one!”  “Reel in!” I bellowed.

“Reel in!” Nil instructed his Big Brudder. He reeled.

It wasn’t a big fish, but it was a first fish, and worthy of bragging rights. I eased the hook out, stuck the victim in our live-bucket, and instructed Sir to reel in and cast again, while I prepared to cast the fly rod so the two-year-old could get in on the action.

Nil was too busy observing the little fish in the bucket, though, until Sir yelled again, “I got another bite!”

It is hard to teach a youngster to “Stick ‘im!” but I did my durnedest, though that fish got off before Sir grasped the concept. But a few minutes later, a big bream hit: I mean, this’un was the size of my hand.

He took that beetle-spin and headed for the Jumping Tree. Lightning McQueen would have been plumb proud of his rod, for my grandboy bent that sucker double when he stuck the fish and started reeling.

The fight was on! Nil was cheering Big Brudder on, as was grandmother Doots, who had joined us too. We finally got the trophy onto the dock, and then mirated over it, until I realized my fly rod was moving. Little Brother needed a lot more instruction on his first fish, but we got it into the bucket.

I have a high school classmate, much older than me, who thereby became a grandfather earlier in life. He had advised me that his grandgirls had inherited his genes in the art of fish stories, for on their first fishing trip with him, they stretched the number they had caught, as well as their size, in reporting to their mother and grandmother that evening.

 Sir shows the same promise. On the way home, he declared, “Grunk, I caught eleven fish!” I replied that I had only counted him catching five. Nil echoed reproachfully, “Five!” That didn’t stop the bragging.

“Well, I caught more and bigger fish than you did, Grunk!” Sir retorted.