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Rick Kushman holds his first catch, a trout he reeled in with Tom Mailey on Folsom Lake. They let the fish go.
That's not news to anyone who drops a line in the water. Me, I was a rookie – a never-caught-a-fish, where-do-I-sit, are-you-serious-we-start-at-dawn newbie. Everything was news.
Here's another thing. The fishing gods hate bananas.
Tom Mailey is teaching me all this on a recent Saturday morning on Folsom Lake. It's just before dawn, and we're in his 16-foot Tracker, moving slowly across the water, joining a quiet, dreamlike parade of small boats scudding off through the half-light to their own prized spots.
The lake looks like polished metal, steely and cold, and the early morning sky has gold and orange splashes between dark streaks of clouds. At a distance, a low gray ridge of fog hangs right on the dam, like it's climbing over and into the lake.
Why dawn, I ask. For Mailey, a longtime friend and all-around good guy, this was already late. He's a morning radio jock, the Tom part of the Pat and Tom show on KNCI, 105.1 FM. His workday starts hours earlier than this.
His theory is, that's when fish feed, like many creatures that eat at first and last light. Tom calls it breakfast and dinner. Though sometimes they prefer lunch.
Maybe 15 minutes out, heavy fog lumbers in. It surrounds us, hems us into a tight circle of misty gray. We could be in the middle of the Atlantic. I wait for the Titanic to come out of the fog.
"Are we in any danger of getting rammed?" I ask Tom.
"Probably," he says.
We're trolling, moving almost 2 mph with a line out from each side with lures trailing 150 feet behind the boat. We're hoping that's far enough, so trout won't notice the boat or the motor. We drop another line deep, with a piece of shad that's supposed to look like an injured fish to attract a salmon.
It's 49 degrees. We're socked in by fog. We can see 20 feet. Everything is still.
"This is it now," Tom says. "This could be it for five hours."
Ah, fishing.
For Tom, like many, many people, this is as natural, and necessary, as breathing. He grew up in Olympia, Wash., and fished the waters around Puget Sound with his father and brother since he was old enough to hold a rod. His wife, Vickie, knows the sport, too. She grew up in an accomplished fishing family.
"She's completely unimpressed by me," Tom says.
On the other hand, I'm a city boy. I dangled some tackle off San Francisco Municipal Pier a few times, but I had the same chance of catching something that way as I did jumping in the bay and subduing a fish by hand. And my wife was unimpressed by me even before she learned I'd never caught a fish.
But this trip to Folsom Lake was about discovery, not redemption, for both of us. Tom came to the Sacramento area in 1992, but only started fishing the lakes and streams in the area in the last half-dozen years after his kids got older and needed less time.
He's still learning the fishing here and was happy to find salmon in Folsom Lake, along with bass and trout.
It turns out, besides stocking the lake with trout, the state Department of Fish and Game plants finger-sized inland chinook and kokanee salmon, roughly 100,000 of each every year, Joe Johnston of the DFG Region 2 office told me.
Fishing folk suspect the kokanee evolved into a self-sustaining population in Folsom. Johnston said the department actually isn't sure. "The chinook definitely aren't self-sustaining," he said, "but I've heard reports of the kokanee spawning way up the rivers."
He also said that because Folsom is close to lots of people, it gets lots of fishing traffic – Johnston fishes there, too – but not a lot of respect.
Tom calls it an underdog lake. "I know guys who go, 'Folsom? Really?' " he says. "Maybe one reason I like it is because it's a little harder here."
Is that why we're out on a cold January morning, I ask. Do it the hard way?
"Some of it is just being here. It's so peaceful," he said. "But also, there's none of what we call 'lake life,' the water-skiers and wakeboarders who scare all the fish."
So here we are, out in the quiet. I'd prepared as best I could. I dressed warm, showed up early and didn't bring bananas. On Tom's warning, I hadn't touched a banana in a week. They are, according to the lore of the fishing gods, very bad luck.
"I don't know why," Tom says, "but I never mess with the fishing gods."
(When I asked around about this, the Fish and Game guys said pretty much the same thing. And one friend told about a daylong sea trip that caught nothing through early afternoon, then they found one guy had a banana in his cooler. The captain turned the boat and came in.)
That's our first hour or so. Cold, fog, no bananas. With Tom's fish finder, we see water depth and fish near the boat.
"In ideal world," he says, "they'll all go crazy for our lure. It's amazing how many times that does not happen. This thing will drive you crazy, 'cause it shows you all the fish you aren't catching, and you start to take it personally."
More quiet. The fog is starting to lift. Then a pole gets all wiggly. Tom pops up. "You got one," he nearly shouts.
Right. Wow. A fish. Tom gives me the rod. "Keep the tip up," he says. I do. "Uh, reel it in, too." OK. It reels smoothly. Then there are a couple of strong jerks. Must be huge, a Great White trout, I'm thinking.
It takes maybe two minutes to get it in the boat. At the end, Tom reaches out with a net to snag it. What he did seemed a lot harder than what I did. "That's your fish," he says. "You caught it."
It's a rainbow trout, and far from great. It's maybe 15 inches, a bit over a pound. Borderline keeper.
"Your call," Tom says.
"Throw him back," I say.
"Good call," he says. "And maybe that'll be good karma."
And right there, at 8:40 a.m. on a damp January day, I'm addicted to fishing.
It's an easy sport to love and to start, but a hard one to master. You can spend fortunes on gear and change lures by the minute. Each lake, each stream, each spot has its own nuances. Tom, a lifelong fisherman, says he's still learning loads about fishing in Folsom from Bruce Frazier, a Citrus Heights resident who's out there almost every weekend.
(We see Bruce later this day. He caught five trout, all small- to medium-size. Tom is medium-happy for him. There's a camaraderie among fishing people. Everyone wants everyone to do well, just not as well as you. "I love being the guy everyone hates for catching more fish," Tom says.)
Even when you have a good day, it's hard to know what you got right or wrong. "Sometimes you just cross paths with a suicidal trout," Tom says. "You tell yourself it's all you."
We find a few suicidal trout over the next few hours. I catch another that we throw back, and a 2-pounder we keep. We'd been fishing near Folsom Dam through the morning, but by early afternoon, we move to the mouth of the south fork of the American River.
We figure a few more minutes, then we'll head in. Hanging with a friend on the calm of the lake is a treat. Folsom is yards and yards low, rimmed by dirt and steep rock. It feels like we're fishing in the Southwest, or on the moon. That's cool, too. And I've found something I want to do again – as soon as the temperature hits 70 degrees
Then another pole jerks. It's another hit. Tip up. Reel smoothly. Remember to breathe. This one's heavier and stronger.
We get it in the boat. It looks huge to me. It's more than two feet long and Tom says over 3 pounds. "That's one of the biggest trout I've ever caught out here," he says.
Whoo-hoo. A whopper, sort of. I love this sport.
We head back toward the launching ramp and a date with the grill. The sun has come out. We're both kinda giggly.
"The fishing gods, they reward patience," Tom says. "And it might be their way to get you hooked on fishing."
TOM MAILEY
Age: 46
• Grew up fishing around Olympia, Wash.
• Of his kids, Emma (age 19), Joe (17) and Sam (13), Joe likes fishing the most.
• Wife Vickie doesn't fish much anymore.
• KNCI radio partner and friend Pat Still doesn't fish much, either.
Rate fishing skills: "I'm definitely not a 'level 1' fisherman. I'm still on a learning curve, but I do know it's a great way to spend an afternoon."
Best place ever fished: Sekiu, a little village in the northwest corner of Washington. "Great fishing spot, but I loved it mostly 'cause I was there with my dad."
Worst place ever fished: "I don't think I ever fished any place I wouldn't go back. I love it so much (that) I literally fish a drainage ditch behind the house. I take the boys back there, but they're usually less enthusiastic about that than I am."
Biggest fish ever caught: 35-pound salmon on the Sacramento River near Chico.
What never to do: Take it too seriously.
What you always should do: Offer to help pay for gas.
On a cold January morning, Tom Mailey and Rick Kushman head out to fish on Folsom Lake.
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