Fishing’s Rituals and Routines Build Enduring Friendships

   I only like to go fishing when I’m alone or with somebody.

   But I’d rather fish alone than go with just anybody.

   After all, few situations are more boring or annoying than being confined to a fishing boat with someone if your only shared interest is fishing. That’s especially true on big water when far from shore with little action and few boats or other sights to distract you when the action slows.

   Because I chose my fishing partners carefully, I never grew bored or annoyed this past week when fishing with family and friends when trolling for walleyes in Vilas County, and struggling to catch panfish on Pool 9 of the Mississippi River near Genoa.

   In several get-togethers the past decade with Hobby Jackson of St. Germain, I’ve never been skunked. Whether targeting brook trout, lake trout or rainbow trout, Jackson and I always caught fish, including some we never expected.

   Maybe we should have stuck with trout. Nothing struck our Rapala Husky Jerk baits for three hours May 25 when Jackson and I trolled the depths for suspended walleyes with my grandson Connor and my son-in-law James Switzer.

A bald eagle flies from its perch atop a dead silver maple tree on the Mississippi River in southwestern Wisconsin.  — Patrick Durkin photos

   Four days later, three friends and I hoped our arrival on the Mississippi River’s shallow backwaters meshed with invading hordes of spawning crappies or bluegills.

   Pfft.

   Fish neither follow our schedules nor share theirs. On May 29, I fished from the bow of Kurt Welke’s old 16-foot Lund as we patiently cast worms, minnows and Gulp baits toward fallen trees and toppled stumps with our friend Ron Leys. Seven hours of infinite casts and many snags produced some fish but not supper that night at Welke’s off-the-grid cabin near Gays Mills. Still, we ate Welke’s feast of asparagus, pork ribs and stuffed mushrooms before Leys drove home to Prairie du Chien.

   Another friend, Joe “Duffy” Brungardt of Lancaster, joined us at Welke’s table after chasing brown trout all afternoon on nearby streams. When Brungardt swapped his hip boots for Leys’ vacant seat in Welke’s boat the next morning, we rewarded him with three hours of fishing futility.

   But no one complained. Welke and I have known each other since we were classmates in the 1960s at Crestwood Elementary School on Madison’s west side. We’ve both known Brungardt since meeting him in junior high in 1968. And Leys? He and I have been friends since meeting in 1984 when he was the Milwaukee Journal’s outdoors editor. He and Welke go back nearly as far, meeting in the 1990s as concerned Crawford County citizens who opposed low-level training flights over their homes.

Ron Leys, left, and Kurt Welke share a laugh while fishing the Mississippi's backwaters near Genoa in Vernon County.

   Good friendships among fishermen take some doing. Besides liking each other personally, it helps if your tastes in boats, gear, fish species, expertise, and preferred techniques mostly align. In other words, flies or worms? Spinning or fly-casting? Trolling or jigging? Catch-and-eat or catch-and-release? And on it goes.

   Of course, you probably won’t even explore those subtleties if your interests and personalities clash. As author/psychologist Robin Dunbar notes, friends tend to have similar professions, worldviews, musical tastes, political opinions and senses of humor.

   Our group checks those boxes, though we don’t discuss the mechanics of friendship. We spend our time sharing laughs, and finding charm in each other’s quirks and petty grievances. For humor, we lean on Leys, who recites bawdy limericks, tells jokes we’ve never heard, and passes fair judgment on local, state and national politicians we know too well. It also helps that Leys reads and listens more than the rest of us, and, just as important, remembers more of what he reads and hears than anyone we know.

   We like to think our friendships go deeper than adolescent humor, though we spend little time noting how. Still, we’d nod agreeably if someone quoted Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson, psychologists who identified some social actions underlying friendships. That is, we stand up for our friends, even when they’re not around; we share important news with them, good or bad; we confide our vulnerabilities to them, but without self-pity; and we offer them emotional support, but without sap or syrup.

   Let’s not get carried away, y’know?

From left, Joe “Duffy” Brungardt, Ron Leys and Kurt Welke eat dinner at Welke’s rustic cabin in Crawford County.

   Meanwhile, we take our eyes off our bobbers often enough to look across the water and overhead, and then pool our knowledge about what we see, whether it’s bad or good. For instance, the sandy banks and islands of the upper Mississippi River now hold vast stands of rotting, long-drowned silver maple trees, most of them victims of months-long floods in recent years.

  According to the National Weather Service, La Crosse in 2019 recorded the most enduring floods in the city’s history. The river’s flood stage averaged 13.65 feet in April 2019, beating the previous average high, 12.96 feet in April 1965. And though the river's average stages fell slightly to 11.95 feet in May 2019, it was still worse than the previous May record of 11.37 feet in 2001.

   Though we have no way of knowing what bald eagles think of all that high water and dead wood, we enjoy watching them make use of it. Bald eagles haul dead branches to build their monstrous nests, preferably in living trees; and perch high in nearby dead trees that serve as lookout posts for their next meal, whether it has fins or feathers. No matter how often we see eagles soaring, nested or perched, we point them out and marvel about their abundance, something we never imagined a half-century ago.

   We feel lucky to have lived long enough to see that change, which took planning, strong science and good government; and luckier still to see eagle sightings become more routine than fluke.

   But our group likely wouldn’t share such sights and discuss their significance with each other if not for fishing. Fishing is a good excuse to reach out, compare schedules and choose a day to share some thoughts.

   And if we’re really lucky, we’ll catch a few fish and fortify a friendship. With fishing, both are possible parts of the process.