I grew up in Alamance County, North Carolina. My grandfather, who started out as a blacksmith, but evolved into an insurance agent had routes all over the county and access to many farm ponds. He loved to fish and he started taking me when I was about 5. Bream, crappie, catfish and the occsional bass, all on worms under a bobber. He continued to take me all his life because I had patience to sit where he told me and to fish where he told me and how he told me. Sometimes he would take two or three of my cousins along, but after 15 minutes or so, they would be off looking for snakes or turtles, throwing things in the water and doing everything else besides fishing.

My first step up was being old enough to fish with cricketts. The bait shop where we got our bait had this contraption with hundreds of cricketts and you'd buy them by the dozen and carry them in a wire tube with a funnel end that you could shake the cricketts down into and they would come out one at at time. A lot less messy than worms.

Then there were the catalba (catalpa ???) worms (sp.?). My grandfather had two trees on his property that he called catalba trees and at a certain time of year, they would be covered with these, I guess, caterpillars, called catalba worms. Anyway, you would take these, pinch them in half, turn a half of a worm inside out on the hook and that half a worm would catch a dozen or so fish before you needed to rebait. I've never seen any reference to these anywhere and never seen them anywhere else.

My biggest fishing adventures as a kid were trips to the outter banks of North Carolina, specifically the Cape Lookout area. We would always launch from Harker's Island, which was like a different country. I just remember a lot of ramshackle cinderblock construction, with nothing new and nothing in good repair. The locals spoke in an accent that you could hardly understand, especially when they were talking to each other.

We never spent a weekend on the outter banks when something didn't go wrong, either mechanically with the boat, or weather-related. We once had to be pulled off of Cape Lookout by the Coast Guard during a squall that turned a beautifull morning into tempast in about 45 minutes. I remember laying on the floor of our tent with my friend and we were the only thing keeping the tent from blowing away as it streamed in the wind, with us wrapped up by the flooring, while my dad and his friend fantically tried to pack up our gear and load it in the boat. The boat got swamped on bhe beach and we were stuck, but the Coast Guard rescued us and our boat and gear in one of the most well-choreographed drills I have ever seen. There were about 8 other people in the boat that they had rescued, several of them out of the water after their boats had sunk with them in it.

One of my most vivid memories of actually fishing that area was after hours of trolling in 90-something degree heat on a dead-calm day. I was holding onto the rod and drifting off to sleep, as no one was catching anything. All of a sudden, the rod was pulled like it just got caught up on a concrete wall. The drag was set tight and I was actually pulled to a standing position with the rod about to be ripped out of my hands when a hundred feet in back of the boat a king mackerel shot skyward, it seemed 10 feet out of the water. It came unhooked, which actually seemed lucky for me, because either I or the rod, or both, were headed out of the back of the boat. When I reeled in, the heavy gauge hook was actually bent straight. I was about 10 at the time.

Those outter banks are a magical place. My brother lives down there now, in Beaufort, N.C., so I still get to visit every now and then.