Saddling Up a Float Tube for Trout and Ducks

Two problems squelched trout fishing and duck hunting for my cousin Morgan Hendricks and me on our small farm in Idaho. Both problems stemmed from the location of the water. One source was down our well, and the other was our irrigation ditch.

Both sources contained only dead fish and ducks, and Morg and I have caught so many of them that all the thrill is gone now.

Luckily Dad rented some ground by Black Canyon, a gorge in our valley with Bear River running in the bottom of it. The problem with fishing and hunting the best spots on the river was getting down into the gorge.

Invariably the fish and ducks saw us clamoring down the rocks, alternately falling, bouncing, and sliding to the bottom. After such an acrobatic show, the fish never bit for us and the ducks always flew away before we slid within range.

Morg blamed me for the bad luck fishing.

"Smell, like sound, travels better in water than in air," he claimed. "Your unbathed scent causes ripples of stench in the water, which alert the fish to our presence. They then swim up or downstream to avoid being choked by the smell in the water."

"You know that ain't true," I countered. "The fish swim away and the ducks always fly even on the day that I bath each month."

We decided a new approach might help, so we invented a flotation tube. Most anglers and duck hunters have seen commercial tubes, but the models currently marketed are cheap and shoddy compared to what Morg and I made.

We borrowed a large tractor tube (from a tractor not in use at the time), filled it with air, and bent one side over onto the other so the tube looked like a large letter C. We borrowed Dad's new nylon rope to tie around the tube to maintain the C shape. We used a new rope because an old one would have rotted out much faster from the constant soaking in the water and drying in the sun.

For trial runs we floated the tube down our irrigation ditch. We slipped off and soaked ourselves so often that our parents thought, when they saw us at meals, that we were actually working, coming in drenched in sweat.

To solve the problem of slipping off, we borrowed a saddle (also not in use at the time) from the barn and cinched it up around the tube. The cinch now held the tube in a C shape, so we hung Dad's rope on the saddle horn, where it belonged.

The saddle horn proved invaluable in helping us stay on the tube, and the various straps on the saddle helped us turn the tube into a first-class sailing vessel.

We tied a water jug on the saddle using the straps on the front left side. We filled the jug with fruit punch and fish bait.

We tied a radio on with straps on the right front side of the saddle, so we could hear weather and traffic reports, ball games, and music. We didn't dare put batteries in the radio while we were on the water, however, because we didn't want hundreds of thousands of volts of power jolting through us if the radio ever fell into the water.

The radio looked impressive hanging there though, and we loaded it with batteries and listened to it when we were at home, sitting on the tube when we should have been doing chores.

On the back left side of the saddle we lashed on a spare life raft, a first aid kit, a pair of crutches, and signal flares. We never used anything but the crutches, which were excellent steering poles. They also made excellent paddles when we traveled down stream (I never got tired using them). But for some reason they wouldn't work at all when we rowed up stream.

On the back right side of the saddle we strapped on a cooler full of food: sandwiches, green apples (which took in so much water that they looked like watermelons), and caviar.

Of course we didn't know that fish eggs were called caviar, or that people ate them and considered them a delicacy. And we don't eat them now that we do know. But we sound like romantic, knowledgeable gentlemen if we mention that we had some.

In the little, three-inch hole in the saddle behind the saddle horn we stuffed some candy bars and chewing gum. The gum was for plugging leaks in the tube.

We loaded the tube and tried to lift it onto a wagon behind our tractor. We couldn't lift the tube loaded, so we unloaded it, hefted it onto the wagon empty, and then reloaded it. (We had reloaded rifle ammo before, but this was the first time we ever reloaded fish bait.)

Our old tractor strained to drag the wagon and loaded tube to town, where the river had not yet entered the gorge. Morg backed the wagon into the river far enough that the water floated the laden tube off the wagon and let it start down the river.

Morg barely had time to shut off the tractor, put it in gear, climb on the wagon, run to the end of it, jump at the tube, miss, swim to it, and climb on before we both realized no one would be down river to pick us up.

The wagon, now free of its heavy weight, started to float down stream. The tractor was heavier than the wagon and thus served as an anchor, or the wagon and tractor would have floated down the river behind us.

We started casting our lines into the water in all directions, trying to get a bite. We must have looked like cowboys with bullwhips to the fish, because they swam ahead of us, like cows on a cattle drive, in an ever-growing school of fish that darkened the water just out of our casting range.