True simplicity in fishing consists of a bamboo cane pole, about 10 feet long, attached to a fishing line of about the same length, with a bobber, sinker, hook, and a wriggling worm. Sitting on a dock, riverbank, or the shore of a lake, pond, or stream, all you have to do is wait for your bobber to go down, and fun begins.
In the deep past, a bamboo cane pole was every kid's starter rod and introduction to the lifetime sport of fishing. Little line tangling, lots of panfish nibbling, much bobber watching, and all the delights of angling. On this date in 1903, an article in the Cooperstown Courier compared the qualities of a cane pole made of bamboo imported from Japan to those of an old-fashioned wooden pole made of hickory, ash, hazel, or willow.
“Every country schoolboy is aware of the superiority of a bamboo fishing pole over any other.” Its flexibility, lightness, and strength distinguish it sharply from any American pole and make it better suited for a fishing rod than one made from any wood grown in this country. The U.S. imported several million bamboo fishing rods every year with perhaps 10 million from China and Japan sold by 1910.
Generations of North Dakota kids dug in their gardens for enough angleworms and dirt to fill a tin can before heading to their favorite fishing hole with bamboo pole in hand out to catch bluegills, sunfish, pumpkin seeds, black crappies, or maybe even a bigmouth bass, a rip-roaring northern pike, or a keeper walleye. The anticipation of fishing was almost as sweet as watching the bobber go down.
Those bobbers changed through the years from bottle corks and balsa wood to red and white plastic balls and, most recently, foam slip bobbers that make it easy to adjust the depth of the bait. And that bait could be night crawlers or angleworms or grubs or grasshoppers or frogs or minnows or leeches, maybe even a kernel of corn. Whatever the bait, when the bobber went down, the joy came up. Isaac Walton said it best, “We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.And so, if I might be the judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling. Doubtless, too, a bamboo starter pole could get a kid hooked on fishing.”
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck
