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It’s the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s Day and while I had thoughts of spending sometime in the darkhouse over ten inches of crystal clear ice on small lake just outside of Ely, Minnesota, the weather had other things in store. It has been raining all day off and on after raining all night long. I woke up during the early morning hours to the sound of rain on our metal roof, a sound that always puts me to sleep during the Summer months, and I drifted back to dreamland, thinking that I’d never left.
Now the lakes are full of standing water and compromised ice until it freezes, but it’s 41 degrees and going to be 38 tomorrow again. I have plenty of fish decoy blanks I could work on. I have a half dozen swim tested fish that are ready for primer and paint. I’ve got some ideas. If I had any ideas to jumpstart the next blank page of my novel, I’d be writing that instead of this. Early in the morning, when no one else is awake and you find yourself by the glow of the Christmas tree lights (if you’re like me) you might start thinking about how you got started carving fishing decoys.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, Mom and Dad were picking antiques pretty regularly for their newest Antique Shop venture in Ely. They found a couple of hand carved topwater lures that an older lady said were her husband’s Go To lures when nothing else would work. Mom gifted those two lures to me and I began carving topwater pop lures to match my favorite of the old dude’s. Soon after I started carving folk art mice, frogs, and popper lures of all shapes. I used to buy Mepps spinner lures at garage sales, find them in the rocks during low water times under bridges and take off their dressed treble hooks and use them on my lures.
I caught smallmouth bass by the dozens and occasionally hooked a big pike. I’d never had more fun fishing. I’ve been thinking lately about why I put my folk art lure carving on the shelf in favor of folk art fish decoy carving. This morning I thought about why I started with decoys. It was because of Dad who passed in 2013. Almost twenty five years ago now, Dad suggested I should try to make some fish decoys. He’d begun finding them more and more while picking antiques and unlike most of the lures they discovered, many of the decoys were made in and around our home town of Ely and on the Iron Range. He’d met and introduced me to some contemporary carvers and soon I was off and running. For the next decade and more, Dad could expect to get decoys as birthday and Father’s Day and Christmas gifts.
It’s almost 2025 and I have only carved a handful of popper and frog lures with an occasional mouse since I started with decoys. I love folk art lures. I love catching Smallies on something I’ve made. I also love taking a concept and making it a reality, even if it seems too fantastic to have catching potential. Lately, I’ve been trying to imagine finding the kind of lures that I dream up in the crazy workshop of my mind when sleep is elusive and creativity has crossed its previous boundaries. I’d like someone, someday to find some of my lures in a well-loved, over used pile of tackle in a wooden box that some old timer nailed together out of pieces of a Dupont dynamite box with the almost completely faded form of a Northern Pike on the lid.
Someone’s Go To lures.
