Build Your Own is Cheaper, Right?

It is winter and we don’t fish in the winter. Unlike my brother and other people affected by “41^st parallel disease” (See Psychologists have a name for it Jan 17, 2016) we prefer our water in liquid form.

Outside water in Illinois during January and February tends to be a little hard. This is prime time to work on fishing equipment and other hobbies. We tell ourselves, and our spouses, this will be an investment, and may produce some income or as a minimum save money. Unfortunately by the time one buys all the parts and equipment to manufacture things, tools,  and adds in the ruined pieces incorrectly assembled, and damage done to one’s home, saving money has to be amortized over 100 years. Like fishing to provide food, the price per ounce is measured in hundreds or thousands of dollars. The only real purpose is to have a purpose.

One of us is true craftsman. One of us consistently produces projects that are beautiful and amazingly detailed. One of us is an artist. That person is Robert. Robert has carefully crafted his work areas as well.

This is Robert's carving bench

Robert has hand carved decoys, and ships. He created acrylic and water color paintings and they are sitting about. His shelves are filled with extremely detailed model sailing ships he assembled from scratch. The hulls, rigging, planks, cannon, and cannon balls are meticulously carved and assembled. He carves the hulls and masts, weaves the rigging, and makes parts that are so small, I need a powerful magnifier to see them. He does all of this from detailed drawings, not building plans. Robert’s crafts need to be seen in person to be truly appreciated. A trip through his basement is like visiting an art museum. 

This is his painting area.

Don and Paul have been bitten by the build your own bug. For years they have carefully wrapped thread around hooks making things called "flies". The hooks are so small one needs a large magnifier to see them.  You also need a special vice to hold the hooks while you wrap (not the music kind). The result is many strange looking creatures with names like "Parachute Adams", "San Juan Worms", and "Wooly Buggers".

Not content with ruining their eyesight, they bought fly rod kits and each spent a winter building a rod. This was a long tedious process, as the rods are built in layers and must be rotated as the laminate dries. This takes months of slow tedious assembly and inhaling fumes. All of this for something more likely to catch a tree than a fish.

Lately they both have attempted lure building. The outdoor supply vendors willingly sold them multiple parts, hooks, lure bodies, paint, etc. They have rattles and decals and vibrant paint colors.

Paul decided he needed a more refined painting technique so he purchased an entire airbrush system. Paul’s first use of his airbrush was with a highly reflective chartreuse paint. Unfortunately this did not go well, and Paul now had a chartreuse colored spot on his ceiling. Let's call it art.

Don has had better luck. He has great carving skills and carefully made some muskie lures. He continues to carve, and build some fantastic looking lures. He also purchased materials to build spinner baits and in line spinners. Don’s basement workbench looks like an assembly line in Bangladesh.

Apparently there are many more lures in his future.

Don assembled lures over the past few winters. Each has a unique color and paint scheme. Some of the colors are pretty wild, but the lures have good action in the water. He has given me several spinners, and my favorite has a pink feather boa. One day I may catch a fish with it.

Then there is me. A few years ago I bought some soft baits called “curly bugs” at Walmart. I bought them on sale and without forethought.  They were just some junky little jig that they had on red tag sale.  I found they worked extremely well for crappies and walleyes. Crappies especially would hit them in any condition. I bought all I could find in many colors. Then they disappeared.

Walmart rarely sells the same stuff every year. They make vendors compete for store space and cheap jigs change frequently. I would stop in every Walmart I passed to check for them. No one had them.

I checked online. There were similar lures, but the tails were wrong. Then I found a website advertising “make your own soft baits”. They had molds, liquid soft rubber in a variety of colors, and scents that could be used. One only needed a heat source, a well ventilated area, and sauce pan. Connie wasn’t going to offer me the needed pan, so I started buying everything and working in my son’s garage. (I was in Texas for the winter.)  I thought I bought everything I needed. The problem was the molds were the wrong shape for my beloved “curly bugs”

Never one to shrink from a home project, I decided to make my own molds. This meant buying more equipment and more supplies. I was ready to sacrifice my last working curly bug. I asked Don, Paul, and Robert to check to see if they had any, but no one did. The last one went into the mold material.

It didn’t work. The mold couldn’t correctly form the curly tail. The body was irregular and wouldn’t pull correctly through the water. I tried more molds, with the same results. I had more than 10 molds of crap and a pile of worthless jigs.

After a frustrating winter, we returned to Illinois. My garage now had a two burner hot plate, a small sauce pan, five bottles of soft bait plastic in multiple colors, 10 molds for curly baits that didn’t work, etc.etc. I still did not have a working jig. I tried to carve a mold from the ones purchased from the soft bait company. Another disaster, and now I had more worthless molds.

Back online, I decided to buy the jigs that had the correct body and wrong tails. I bought a bag of 100. Upon their arrival, I performed a tail-ectomy on the jigs. Using an Exacto knife, each jig was castrated. Then a bag of readily available curly tail jigs was purchased and their tails were removed. Using a special soft bait glue ($10.00 for ½ oz. bottle) I made my Rickenstein monster curly bugs. I saved all the castrated parts, hoping to re-melt some of the plastic for future uses. To date, this has never happened.

After gluing my fingers several times, and gluing the jigs to a board, I developed a technique which resulted in a poor representation of the desired lure. Some of the tails were hanging to the side, some barely attached, but I assembled enough to prepare for the upcoming season.

Rickensteins

Although a fish will occasionally pull off a tail, the jigs work fairly well. They swim well and stay down, and they catch fish. I have enough supplies to build about 15 a year for the next 6 years. Eventually this will save money won't it?

So the depressing days of winter are upon my friends in Illinois. With Christmas over, there isn’t anything but unwanted snow and ice and cloudy days in the immediate future. Working on winter craft fishing projects, keeps the fishing juices flowing. Every lure, like every baseball team, looks like a winner in January. We will build, plan, and make mistakes. We will continue to unintentionally paint things and glue our fingers. We will buy more parts, supplies, and paint, but we will stay warm. All we need is for the water to return to liquid and we are back fishing. We will have increased our investment in our hobby and be ready to catch fish for another year. 

Post script

Last summer I found that readily available curly tail jigs worked about as well as my Rickenstein jigs for walleyes. Would anyone like to save money on fishing lures by making their own?  I am having a sale on soft bait rubber, molds, and a saucepan

Lost

Technically, I have never been lost. I consider being lost to be without hope of finding your way, like the Donner party.  Close to being lost is when you have to ask someone for directions. I have been close to being lost several times. I am still alive, living in the same country, and have not eaten anyone. Therefore I have not been lost!

 I have, on occasion, been directionally challenged. There were circumstances where I needed to change the direction of travel in order to shorten the distance to my destination rather than taking the circumnavigation of the globe route; like the Garmin lady, I often am “recalculating”

My theory is that we are descended from pioneers heading for California or Oregon. They were so directionally impaired that they thought they had arrived at the Promised Land when they stopped in Illinois for a “bathroom” break. Asking the local natives for their location, they were told the native word for “I don’t know”. 

It went something like this:

Ancestors “Where the f**k are we?”

Native Illinois Americans  (thinking the pioneers were asking about the Fukarwee tribe) responded “California” which means “I don’t know”.

Why else would anyone choose to live in Illinois, land of wind, ice, high humidity, and mosquitoes? Lost ancestors has to be the excuse. The “Not lost, just changing direction” gene was passed down to each of us native Illinoisans through our mixture of mostly recessive genes.

The “Principals of Fishing and Boating” have varying degrees of directional impairment. None of us takes the direct route to a place. Robert is famous for his “no interstates” travels. He once traveled to Bermuda (you know the island) by driving. Given the need to arrive with Robert driving, you will take multiple country roads, several side streets, and an occasional corn field. You will arrive safely, but will have no clue how you got there.

One of  Robert’s routes.😈

Don couldn’t find his way across the street. The first time Don and I traveled together, we failed to find Chicago O’Hare field and drove on towards Wisconsin. You may have heard of O’Hare, the largest airport in the nation. It was only through a casual observation I made about the diminishing number of planes in the sky that Don actually looked at the highway signs and determined we were heading to Wisconsin and well past the airport.

Don and I have missed more turns than a drunken Monopoly player. We are particularly bad at driving on cross country fishing trips. We drove around the town of Lake City (population 100) for about 15 minutes looking for the lake. (There is no lake in Lake City). We did ask directions on this trip, just not in Lake City.

I blame all of this on Don, Paul and Robert. They tell so many stories while traveling that we all become totally distracted. How can you follow road signs, when Don is telling stories about starting a fight and getting thrown out of game because the first baseman tagged him “too hard”?  Following directions while Robert tells stories of taking a bucket to a bar to get draft beer for his Dad when he was eight is virtually impossible. How can one focus when Paul is telling about his minister father taking a dump from a boat in a heavy fog only to have the fog lift while still exposed and discovering they were surrounded by boats?

Over time technology developed to help people like us. Before technology intervened we had to follow oral directions. These required one to turn on a particular road, and require you see the road signs. Directions discerned from looking at a map require that the map be oriented to the direction you are going. We never mastered either of these, so some geeks invented the Garmin GPS just for us.

We only need to plug it in and put in the address where we are traveling. Of course these are two skills we have not fully mastered. The Garmin directs you, in a pleasant female voice, to make the next turn in “300 feet” etc. It even nags you to “turn left”, “turn left” before deciding you missed your turn and need to go through “recalculating.” She never gets upset like your spouse does because you “never listen to her”.

Don and I took our first technology aided trip to a somewhat local lake. Armed with maps, Don’s Garmin, easy to see landmarks, and confident of avoiding wrong turns, we headed to SanChris Lake south of Springfield, IL. (His wife, Pat, put in the address for him.) Sanchris is a power plant lake and has a huge chimney marking the power plant location. The chimney can be seen from miles away, because the land around Springfield is some of the flattest in the world. The people near Springfield consider an ant hill to be an actual hill.

Needless to say, we couldn’t find the lake. Garmin said it was on the left, but there was nothing there but a farmhouse. Figuring we missed it we backtracked, all the way to Springfield. We tried again; again Garmin said it was on the left, so this time we turned right, traveled until we found the interstate highway and then turned back.

Finally after multiple back and forth trips into and out of Springfield we turned left at the intersection by the farmhouse, and decided to go past it. It was the ranger station and the entrance to the lake. The huge smokestack could be seen just past the tree line behind the “farmhouse”. (In our defense, there was only a small sign on the opposite side from which we came.)

Paul has given me some interesting trips. The first time I discovered he possessed the “gene” was while leaving Sullivan to return home from fishing Lake Shelbyville. ( See “Almost Holiday” from January 11, 2016). Arriving in Mattoon, IL some 18 miles south and east of Sullivan, we discovered we were not in Decatur, north and west of Sullivan.

Paul has made more wrong turns than “Wrong Way Corrigan”. While traveling with me, he has driven through the wrong toll lane; had to back his boat and trailer a 1/4 mile because he missed a local bar meeting place;  headed to Chicago on Interstate 90 while trying to locate Bloomington, and sent me on a trip through Canton while trying to locate a road that doesn’t go to Canton. The Chicago reroute was assisted by the On Star  rep. who couldn’t locate Interstate 39 on a map. It wasn’t really Paul’s fault you see. By the way, there was no exit before Chicago on Interstate 90 making a 4 hour trip into 8 hrs.

I confess, I have made a few miscalculations myself. Mainly my problems have arisen from attempts to save time with “shortcuts”. Don and I had a shortcut to eastern Illinois. When I offered to take a shortcut to Eastern Illinois University, Tim M., who was traveling with me said “We black folks don’t like shortcuts through the country”.

I should have listened to Tim. While attempting to visit Jim C. in Marshall IL, I took my boss, Bob, on the shortcut. We traveled 50 miles out of our way, and then 50 miles back leaving us an hour and half late to meet Jim. Needless to say, no one in the district accepts directions from me.

Faced with our inability to locate where we are traveling, every fishing trip begins with an adventure.  No one completely trusts Garmin or On Star, but they at least pay attention when stories are being told. Fortunately we have always made it and have never been "lost".  However, to make sure we get there safe, Don, Paul and Robert always call their spouse upon arrival.

 Connie has given up on me.