Superstition,
They Don't Call Me Lucky For Nothin'!

By: Richard Alves
July 26, 2004

Everyone knows how superstitious professional baseball players are. A player on a hot streak tries to keep doing everything exactly the same day after day; believing something he's doing might be bringing him luck. This could be anything from not shaving to wearing the same pair of socks for a month. A player in a slump is trying to do something different every day to break his bad luck. You can always spot these guys; they're the ones with the brand new clean caps. Well, superstitiously speaking, baseball players are in minor leagues compared to anglers!

The most renowned source of bad angler luck is the banana. When the boat hasn't landed a fish by late morning you're sure to hear "OK who brought the bananas?" The banana superstition has its origin in Mexico where stories have it if a banana was found on the boat; the angler responsible was tossed over the side with the bananas. The funny thing is, it may not be an angler myth. More than once I've seen fish start biting within minutes of the bananas being tossed, a few times the bananas were still within sight of the boat. I've even seen it happen with banana yogurt and banana cookies!

Most fly fishermen will tell you, steak is mandatory when you're camping and trout fishing. If you have a steak in the cooler, you will catch fish for dinner. Leave the steak at home you won't see a fish.

Clothing can be another source of ju ju, good or bad. Many trout fishermen adhere to the "wear white, the fish don't bite" superstition and most fishermen have their lucky hat. I know fishermen who throw their hat away when they get skunked. And don't forget to break in that fishing shirt on a good day after you have landed a couple of fish. This is supposed to put good luck into the shirt or teach it how to catch fish.

Fishermen, like baseball players, also have streaks and slumps and hot days. I'm sure you've been on a boat where one person, using the exact same bait and rig as everyone else will land five fish while you work all day to scratch out one. The following day, someone else in the same group will have the hot hand. Rods can also have hot days; pass it around and everyone using it catches fish.

Generally speaking my philosophy is fish hard, fish smart, and the catching will take care of itself. However, the last few weeks of fishing have produced the wildest swings of luck I have ever experienced. It's had me scratching my head and contemplating the possibility of working superstitions and fish gods.

It all started innocently enough on a small mountain lake. When we arrived it was overcast but calm. By the time we finished rigging our fly rods and getting the driftboat launched the wind was blowing hard enough to generate white caps. By the time we rowed to promising looking water off a point, the wind was howling.

The first few casts were laughable as the wind threw fly lines back at the boat in a pile. The wind turned the anchored boat and was at my back. I was able to get off a perfect cast and immediately a trout hammered the fly. Over the course of an hour I only managed four decent casts but they all produced fish. By this time the anchor was not holding and it took all my strength to row against the wind. We decided it was time to call it a day. I had four fish, the rest of the boat zero.

My next adventure was springer fishing on the Salmon River in Riggins Idaho. Over two and a half days I landed seven fish. The first day we fished for 14 hours and really had to work for our limits. The second day I hadn't even had a bump by mid morning. Then with three consecutive casts I had three fish and was limited out in about forty minutes. In all the years I've been fishing rivers, that has never happened to me and I have not seen it happen to anyone else.

The following week, I was in Spokane attending a conference. A small group of us decided to do some fishing on a local lake. I got up and purchased my Washington day license and headed to our rendezvous location. The locals decided it was going to be dangerously windy to fish the Washington lakes so the decision was made to head for the North Fork of the Coeur Coeur d' Alene River in Idaho, some 85 miles away. We had to stop and get Idaho licenses and of course I didn't have any of the hot fly in the box so I bought a handful. By the time we got on the water it was mid afternoon.

It soon became apparent the flys were not floating and the fish were not going to hit anything else. After a couple of casts, the flys would start sinking at the tail. After four casts, they sank. I did manage to get four fish to take, but because of the angle of the fly sitting on the water, hooksets just produced air. A close look at the fly revealed the bodies were tied out of cotton and the wings were too sparse to float the fly. Time for a new hat!

A couple of days later, I fished Lake Pend Oreille at Sand Point, Idaho trolling for trophy rainbows. "I can just about guarantee a trophy fish," the skipper claimed. I ended up with a five pound, maybe, bull trout which had to be released. My luck had indeed turned.

This week's fishing was north of the Golden Gate for salmon. I was fishing with Barry Canevaro of Fish Hookers Sportfishing ad a friend of his. He had just installed two brand new 150 horse Honda four-strokes on the Fishin' Fool IV and were taking her out for a shakedown cruise. The ocean was calm and we made the cruise from Richmond to Muir beach in about a half an hour. We were marking bait balls in the sixty feet of water from bottom to top, and plenty of salmon.

Barry was getting third line in the water when a fish hit my rotary salmon killer. It was a small salmon and soon I had it to the surface about thirty feet behind the boat. The flasher broke the water which produced some slack in the line. The fish did a headshake and tossed the hook. "You professionally farm a fish like that this early in the day, it's going to be a long day," Barry told me.

We trolled between Muir and Stinson until afternoon. Birds, bait and salmon we everywhere but we didn't get a single hit. There were radio reports of small salmon south of the Gate. Barry decided to give it a shot. By the time we arrived the bait was gone, the birds were gone and so were the salmon. We weren't marking anything. After a couple of hours, we called it a day. "I know better than to chase radio fish," Barry confided.

The following morning I boarded Capt. Dave French's Payback in Bodega Bay with anglers from Coastside and Bayside fishing clubs. The fish were right off Bodega Head, there were near a hundred boats on the water. We started trolling and landed the first fish, a small one, in about twenty minutes. The fleet was catching fish but we hadn't seen a fish over 10 pounds netted. By mid morning everyone on the sixpack had a least one fish to the boat except me.

The clicker on my real started screaming and my rod doubled over. I could tell this was a pretty good fish from the strength of the run and the weight on the rod when I finally got him turned toward the boat. As the adrenaline pumped through my veins, all I could think was DON'T GEEK THIS FISH!

After what seemed like eternity, Capt. Dave netted the beast and got it into the boat. It went 20.5 pounds and won the jackpot. Maybe I've found my new lucky hat. Almost got two years out of the last one.

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