Charles Johnson grew up as a country boy fishing bream. He cut his own cane poles from creek cane (bamboo that had escaped from cultivation).
For bait, he dug earthworms or caught black crickets.
Money was tight in those days. So Johnson picked up black nylon fishing line discarded by more-affluent fishermen.
“I’d sit down and untangle it so I could use it,” he said. “I beat out my own weights on my grandpa’s anvil from scrap lead. Corks were a piece of bottle cork or simply just a wooden stick.
“My earliest memories are of fishing for bream in a couple of ponds behind our house near Wakefield. The first little one I would catch I would give to my older brother Vernon. He would put it on a hook on his cane pole to catch bass.”
By the late 1960s Johnson graduated from cane poles to 10-foot fiberglass jig poles. He used these for many years before moving on to ultralight spinning rods and reels. The little rods were 5 feet long or less.
His latest gear shift came four or five years ago when he ordered a Shakespeare Crappie Hunter combo rod and reel from a catalog.
The 9-foot rod was built on an IM-6 graphite blank. It was equipped with an ultralight spinning reel that he spooled with 6-pound test monofilament line.
He liked it so much he gave all of his short rods away.
“It can cast light weights so much farther than short rods,” Johnson explained. “But it is long enough for me to use like my old jig poles.
“Don’t get one of them 12- or 14-foot rods in the tackle stores. The cost is over $40 and ain’t worth a flip.”
Today, Johnson travels regularly to fish. He used to fish Lake Tombigbee in Mississippi for chinquapins (called “strawberries” there) with his late friend Jerry Summers.
Bream stops in Louisiana have included Lake Bruin, Old River, False River, the Lake Maurepas canal complex, Lake Verret, Lake Killarney on the grounds of Angola State Prison and the Atchafalaya Basin, as well as smaller private lakes and ponds.
