Picking A Partner

Finding the right hunting and/or fishing partner is an extremely important and serious undertaking and can sometimes take years. Ideally, it should be someone with the same level of love for your chosen sport and of similar personality and disposition. After all, you will be sharing one of the most significant portions of your life with this individual. Generally speaking, you will want to stay away from escaped convicts, politicians and weather forecasters. It is pretty obvious why you would exclude the first two. You don’t want the third because hunting and fishing success depends upon the decisions you and your partner make, and weather forecasters are wrong 85% of the time.

My favorite partner is my friend Ducky Jones. Truth be told, I would have chosen him for his name alone. However, out of a desire for domestic tranquility, I tell my wife that she is my best fishing buddy. I can’t believe she falls for that. Since she won’t touch a cricket or worm, can’t get her line untangled and will not unhook any species of fish, you would think she would notice my frustration at having to spend most of my time tending to those duties for her. But, she says “Thank you” after each little task I perform. On a good day of fishing, I can get 50 or 60 expressions of gratitude from her. Exhausting as it is, I defy any other husband to claim he receives so many verbal gratuities from his spouse. So, I suppose it all evens out.

On the other hand, it has occurred to me that she knows exactly what she is doing and is playing me for the idiot most people know I am… Nah!

Ducky has many times scared me so badly as to require an underwear change. He has almost gotten me killed on more than one occasion. He has embarrassed me to the point a lesser man would have cried like a little girl. On the other hand, he has saved my life, talked us out of several well deserved tickets and at least one arrest, and he’s made me laugh until I peed myself. And he has accompanied me on the most successful trips afield I have ever had. He also backs me up when I tell my wife she is my favorite fishing partner.

“Yes ma’am. You are all he talks about when we go fishing. It’s Linda this and Linda that. Makes me jealous!”

Ducky is so cool.

He is not the only guy I have hunted and fished with, of course. I have been with a lot of people, but they just didn’t cut it. Their potential as the perfect partner can most easily be evaluated by their actions. For instance, a fellow asked me to go bass fishing with him after he showed me his new boat. It was a tricked-out, fully loaded powerful craft that cost more than my house.

I thought, “This guy must be a great bass fisherman,” and I jumped at the chance to go with him.

We headed out the very next weekend. Though it was extremely windy, he roared up the lake at terrifying speed, whipped into a cove, cut the engine, made two quick casts, said “they’re not biting here,” cranked up and tore up the lake again.

This went on for 30 minutes. I thought the waves were going to beat the fillings out of my teeth. Finally, I told him I had to go back to the landing because my ankle was broken.

Another time, a landowner invited me to his place to do some deer hunting. We walked back to a beautiful winter wheat field. It was some of the most prime deer hunting territory I had ever seen. We climbed into two separate tree stands about 20 yards apart and settled down to wait and watch. I had never seen nor heard so much activity and noise from a single human being in my whole life. He had a ceaseless smoker’s cough and squirmed around so much you would have thought a possum was loose in his pants. And every 10 minutes or so, he would yell to me, “Seen anything yet?” Needless to say, I hadn’t. A one-eyed, deaf buck would not have come within 300 yards of us.

Yet again, I accepted an invitation to squirrel hunt with a nice enough fellow who said he knew a place that would guarantee us a limit of bushytails. He was right. The place was full of squirrels. Within 30 minutes, we had shot five each. I was using a .410 and retrieved all of mine. He was using a 12 gauge auto with high-brass shells. We found none of his. They had simply disintegrated. I don’t think he was so much interested in hunting as watching small mammals explode.

Yes, I’ve been afield with some real losers. One was a fan of ultralight fishing gear. Wouldn’t use anything else. I told him the pond we were going to fish had some real lunkers in it and that he might want to reconsider switching to some stouter stuff. He scoffed at me.

On his second cast, he hung a bass that promptly melted the gears in his little reel and broke his rod into three pieces before the line snapped. We had been there four minutes, and he was ready to go home.

It has been worse. I woke up in the middle of the night once at a deer hunting club cabin with this guy sitting on a stool by my bunk, staring at me. I screamed, he screamed, and then I screamed again. With no explanation, he went back to bed. I laid awake the rest of the night with my skinning knife in my hand.

And I let this other guy talk me into a float fishing trip. He made it sound great. The current was so strong, I was actually only able to make about 10 casts the whole morning. On the one strike I had, I set the hook too hard, flipped over my canoe and was immediately swept away. When they finally found me clinging to a limb 2 miles downstream, he was still laughing. He said I was lucky. Sometimes it took three or four trips for that to happen.

You don’t have to go through a lot of experiences like these, though, if you just talk to folks. Listen carefully to what they say, and you can get a fundamental idea not only of their potential compatibility but their incompatibility. For instance, you should never, ever, ever go fishing or hunting with people who say things like:

“The magazine on my new deer rifle holds 32 rounds, and I can empty it in less than five seconds.”

“Success is not how many fish you have caught. It is how many beers you have had.”

“I didn’t actually see any deer yesterday, but I did get off a few shots.”

“I can’t get boat insurance anymore.”

“Did you see that buck’s horns?”

“I’ll bring a few blastin’ caps in case they’re not bitin’.”

“He kept asking if I had my safetyon. What’s a safetyon?”

“That’s why I’ve got a 225 hp on this baby. Ain’t no game warden alive gonna catch me.”

“The smell of cordite gives me flashbacks.”

“I decided to go into the guiding business when I discovered I could conjure up fish.”

“I always carry a handgun on fishing trips. The FBI has been following me for months.”

“I only go duck hunting if my horoscope says it’s OK.”

“Wait a second. I’ve got to go back and get my huntin’ whiskey.”

“Don’t worry about it. Those ‘No Trespassing’ signs have been up there for years.”

“When they’re bedding, I like to bass fish with a .22.”

“I can’t go deer hunting this weekend. The spotlight on my pick-up is busted.”

“My favorite live baits are cockroaches and leeches.”

“I coon hunt for a living.”

“I caught a 7-lb. bluegill last week.”

And above all, if somebody asks you to go “noodling” with them, run away. I’m convinced those people are a few bolts—or fingers—short. Run far and run fast. Don’t look back.

I hope these tips will help you to find a partner as good as Ducky Jones or (in case she reads this) my wife Linda.

Editor’s Note: Garry’s new book “Dixie Days,” where he reminiscences of a Southern boyhood fishing, hunting and growing up in the Deep South, is available at Amazon.com, $12 soft cover. Search title and author.