Floater Fishing

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My Dad and I bought inner tube bass fishing floaters when I was about 12 years old and often headed out from our home in Phillips, Texas, early to do some serious bass fishing. Here’s the story.

 

 

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Floater Fishing

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My Dad picked up a couple of old used truck inner tubes from Louies Tires in Borger and bought us both a pair of chest high waders that we wore with high top tennis shoes. The floaters were made of heavy canvas which zipped over the inner tubes before they were inflated. The floaters had three large pockets on top which zipped open. In one pocket, we put three cans of canned Vienna sausage, a packet of crackers in a plastic bag, and a couple of cans of coke. In another, we put our fishing tackle in a small box. The floaters had a canvas seat with leg holes to put your legs in when you got down to the water.

 

 

Riding one of these floaters all day out there about a foot off of the water gets you right down there with the fish and allows you to fish areas you can not reach from the shore.

 

 

 

In order to move the floaters effectively once we got in the water, we strapped these green aluminum fins to our tennis shoes. When you kicked your foot forward, the fins would lay back along side of your heel for minimum resistance. When you kicked your foot backwards, the blades would catch out perpendicular to your foot and propel you forward. They worked very well to move you around the lake.

 

The green aluminum fins that we strapped to our tennis shoes that so effectively moved us around the lake on our floaters.

 

 

My Dad knew about this tiny little lake on private property just across the state line in Oklahoma that was rarely fished and was loaded with large bass. We would leave the house about 6 AM and arrive at this small town in Oklahoma about 7:30 AM. We stopped at a filling station where my Dad paid the guy $5 and he gave us a key to the property gate and gave us instructions not to leave the gate open. The lake was about 1000 feet in diameter with cattails all around the edges making it virtually impossible to fish from the bank. We suited up in our floater fishing gear and hit the water with our poles in our hands. My Dad would go one direction and I went the other. We both used Lazy Ike fishing lures and we found that they worked well here. I remember being awed by a huge whooping crane wading in the cattails as I worked around the lake. When you hooked a large bass on the floater, it was difficult to land them because you were down at their level, and had to wear them plumb out to the point you could reach down grab them by the bottom lip. So I lost a few on the way around the lake. By the time we got all the way around the lake, I had three large Largemouth Bass and my Dad had five. They ranged from 3 to 5 pounds. We cleaned the bass and put them on ice and dropped the key off and headed home feeling like we were sitting on top of the world looking down on creation. These fishing trips we took together were some of the best times I had growing up.

 

 

You can’t get much closer to nature than being out there fishing off of the tube floater.

 

 

Thanks for reading Floater Fishing,
Bill