Scott “Coach” Stankowski
Senior Outdoors Writer
July 26, 2012
Austin with a nice cat.
Stevens Point–Getting together with an old friend is always a good time. It is even better if you can share that time in the outdoors. That is exactly what I did this last week, hooking up with lifelong friend Nick Hefling as he visited Stevens Point for some work. In our planning conversations, Nick had the great idea of hitting the Wisconsin River, for old time’s sake. Nick and I grew up fishing the ‘Scons’ as soon as we could ride our bikes in Kronenwetter behind the Foremost plant. For the most part, we did not know what the heck we were doing, our favorite presentation back then was a plain old fuzzy grub without anything on it. We would cast it out and wait for hits in the current. How in the heck we ever caught any fish remains a slight mystery to this day, as that presentation is neither of Nick or mines top choice these days. We caught a vast variety of fish and always had a good time.
This time around we headed to an old favorite spot from college. Back then we would take Nick’s boat down and motor up into a treacherous stretch of water that ate props for a living. Fortunately, the boat rode high and missed most of the rocks. Our favorite spot was anchoring up near an old piggyback rock that stuck out of the water. We would sit back, cast slip bobbers with worms and catch smallmouth bass and walleyes at a fairly steady pace.
This year we did not take my boat, as it is a bit big for that stretch of water, and I am not willing to take a chance with my propeller. We took Austin and parked along side of the road. We met a couple of old timers that looked like a couple of refugees from Men In Black Three. They told us they didn’t have a bite, and I told them a yarn about how we slammed them there yesterday catching fifteen fish.
“Jeepers Scott, you didn’t have to lay it on so thick,” Nick told me as we walked down the bank.
I just laughed as we both acted like we were in our twenties again. I waded my way up to the piggyback rock only getting as deep as my armpits. I carried a pair of rods and a dish of crawlers with me. Austin stayed up on shore, as he was scared of a big fish attacking him. Nick waded down river a bit heading to an old favorite spot of his own.
“Fish ON!” I looked over at Nick and his pole was bent over. He battled the fish on his ultra light tackle like the fish was a once in a lifetime affair. Nick loves using the light tackle and battling the fish, after a few minutes, he was hoisting a five-pound channel catfish out of the water.
A minute or so after that, my bobber went down and I set the hook to land my own catfish of near the same size. We continued to battle back and forth catching multiple catfish and a few smallmouth bass to keep us wondering what we had when the bobber went down. After setting the hook it did not take long to figure out what we had on the end of the line as the cats would stay low and the bass would put on an acrobatic show jumping out of the water to shake the hook. The fish were noticeably warm in this shallow water, almost feeling as though they were warm-blooded. With the rocky bottom, I am sure they were using the area as a feeding ground. Using two poles was to my advantage as I edged Nick out in the caught fish category. By the end of the hour and a half of fishing we had caught almost twenty fish, making my story to the gents we saw before fishing almost a true tale.
We got back into the truck, sitting on towels with smiles on our faces as we headed back home. A mile down the road we stopped momentarily and reminisced about how Nick’s boat got its name. We were heading back from the square one late night with another friend, Mike Johnston. Somehow the two of them got into an argument and started comparing things. “Nice car!” Mike would say, “Kiss my @#$, nice face.” Nick replied. It went on for a little bit, escalating each time. I couldn’t stop egging it on and laughing in the back seat. Finally Mike said “NICE BOAT!” In all honesty the boat was a pile, but it was a great fishing boat and did the job. Nick slammed on the brakes and told Mike to get out in all seriousness. Mike pleaded and said he was just joking but Nick turned the vehicle off and would not budge. Finally Mike got out of the car and Nick sped off.
“How dare he say that about my boat,” Nick questioned to me. I started laughing, repeating the words “Nice boat.”
Nick started laughing too and said, “You are right, it is a nice boat.”
He stopped the car and put it into reverse to pick Mike back up, as he got back into the car, I hollered “Nice BOAT!” and we all began to laugh.
The name stuck.
Until next time,
Shoot straight.
