Just bobbin’ along

Like the twitching yellow barrels in “Jaws,” the bobber bobs, signaling an unseen underwater presence.

Suspended a foot off the bottom in five feet of water, the worm just hangs there, unmoved by wind or current.

The water is cold, in the mid 30s, not that much warmer than ice. The fish are sluggish, in energy-conservation mode, disinclined to chase a moving bait.

The fish — mostly bluegills with an occasional sucker and even less occasional bass — eye the bait until one of them tastes it.

The suspense builds as the plastic orb jiggles and pauses.

Now it’s up to you. Don’t wait for it to go under. It’s not going under. Strike too soon and you yank the bait away from the fish. Wait too long and it will have cleaned the bait off your hook.

On the nice days before Thanksgiving, I prepared for the arrival of my grandkids, who like to go fishing when they visit their Papa Orlan.

Lanni, 8, and Michael, 14, city kids from Ames, like to bobber fish for whatever is biting. Not really my style, but it’s fun seeing them have fun.

I bought a box of nightcrawlers, tied a tiny jig to the end of my line, attached a bobber a few feet above the jig and went scouting for an easily accessible spot where fish might cooperate.

To amuse myself I counted the seconds between the alighting of my bobber on the water and its first twitch. On one such outing, in 10 casts, I had two 4-second intervals, two fives, a six, a seven, an eight and three patience testers in the 18- to 20-second range. Such instant gratification made up for the merely token resistance of the lethargic fish.

Day after day I kept going back — not so much (as I told myself) to stay on top of the action for Michael and Lanni, but because (I grudgingly admitted to myself) I was enjoying it.

As fate would have it, with the sudden onset of winter, the river froze over before Michael and Lanni could partake of the fun.

As bites go, the jiggling bobber lacks the audio/visual flare of a smallmouth bass leaping out of the water to crush a topwater lure or the distinctive “toink” of an aggressive walleye inhaling a jig. But there’s something about it that grows on you.

At first I thought it was just nostalgia — a harkening back to the carefree days of the 1950s and ‘60s, when the local Toms and Hucks skipped school to watch bobbers skitter across the surface of the Wapsipinicon backwaters above Quasky.

But the more that dancing bobber pulled me back to the river, the more I realized that what was fun then is fun now. Some things you don’t outgrow.

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