I CURRENTLY SUCK AT FISHING. I’ve been skunked for the last several years on opening day. I went with 40 guys. Nearly all of them caught trout and many caught their daily limits. I didn’t get a nibble. In front of them, I act like it’s no big deal, but privately it is starting to irritate me. It’s a bitter, unavoidable truth. I’m a lousy fisherman.

It’s been this way for years, but it hasn’t nagged me until now that I have the tip of my nose over the horizon of my 2015 retirement. If I intend to spend any of those idle days with a pole and line in the water, I best get my act together.

It is time to develop a fishing plan. A big piece of the solution is motivation. I feel I have the instincts already inside me. I just need to rekindle them. As a youth growing up in Pennsylvania I was an avid, successful fisherman.

Phil, my brother-in-law, a few years my senior, taught me to fish. Here are some of his lessons: On small streams for native trout, use a 9-foot pole with a worm and crawl the last 20 feet on your belly. Fish upstream. On bigger streams with stocked fish, visit the hatchery and then dress like the man who feeds the fish. On lakes, at the end of your fishing day, don’t take your worms home to die. Toss all your remaining bait into your favorite fishing hole.

I stopped fishing when I moved to the Bay Area. None of my techniques worked. I never took to pier fishing and I don’t own a boat. Driving to rivers was an expedition beyond my interest and means.

The opportunity to improve is at my fingertips. Chad, my son-in-law, is an avid, successful fisherman who lives just up the street in Sacramento. He’s offered to take me under his wing many times.

Chad and brother Brad and dad go fishing and boating together several times a month. They have been doing so for life. Brad has the boat. My little grandson Jack, age 7, has magic, luck or skill on his side, because he pulls in the biggest fish of the day. My phone beeps all the time with pictures of Jack holding fish as wide as he is. Last time I was camping with them, Jack returned from fishing hanging out of the passenger window of his dad’s truck yelling, “I caught the granddaddy of them all.”

My angling tackle is pathetic. I don’t own a real pole. I have a stumpy, collapsible pole with an old Shakespeare casting reel. It’s from my backpacking days when I had to travel light. My crooked blue line is as old as the reel. My meager tackle is in one of those generic green bags. It consists of the same two packages of Eagle Claw hooks, sizes 10 and 12, that I’ve been drawing from for 10 years, a zip bag holding a dozen split-shot sinkers, a bobber, a nylon stringer, a hook-dislodging stick, and two old jars of Power Bait.

I have fished my whole life with worms, salmon eggs, and recently Power Bait. That’s it, no variety, unless you want to count chunks of cheddar and bread balls. I have no lures of any sort and have never used a lure. If you were to lay out six lures, I couldn’t tell you what fish they were intended for. I don’t know a bass from a trout lure. I don’t know which ones to use where. It’s the same dilemma I have with my spice rack.

Do I want to branch out and learn my lures? I suppose. I might give them another go. I did try using lures one season, but gave up after an hour because they were too much work. I didn’t like all that reeling in. I like to cast and wait. That’s my preferred method. Some people reach a fishing location and begin casting and cranking. I look for a Y-shaped stick to jam in the ground. I find a comfortable seat, wrap the line around my fingertip, keep my eye on my pole tip, and while my time away.

Another proclivity of mine is that I want to eat every fish I catch. I have no desire to catch fish I have no use for. Catch and release doesn’t appeal to me. It’s like going hunting with blanks. Why bother? If I want to relax in a natural setting, I’ll just sit there.

This is just my sunny-day-fisherman quirk. I can empathize with passionate fishermen who love being on the water plying their skills and wrestling with resistant fish whether they eat them or not. I was that way in the Pennsylvania wilds, where rivers full of trout went on for miles without any fishermen. I’m still uncomfortable standing at a promising hole on a California river with six other guys all casting into the same well. I prefer solitude.

Still, and finally, whatever my level of future fishing may be, when I do go fishing, I’d like to catch something.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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