Crappie are "expensive" for essayist this year

It's the season for pursuing pan fish, including that Minnesota favorite the crappie. As essayist Peter Smith explains, the crappie season will having an impact on many family budgets.

Smith: A friend of mine called the other day. The ice was out. The crappies were in. He wanted to go fishing. It sounded like fun, so I went to the garage to take a look at the family fishing gear.

The kids had not been kind to the rods and reels over the years. They were dirty, broken and snargled, and, bedraggled like that, they just didn't have that sense of fishing optimism you need for spring crappies

This time of year, you need a positive mental attitude. You have to be Dale Carnegie in a fishing hat, and those rods were oozing negativity.

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The tackle box was just as bad. Five or six year's worth of plastic worms had melted together with old hooks, lures and stray fishing line. It was all one big wad. Yuk.

What to do... What to do...

I did what any self-respecting husband/father/outdoorsman would do. I went to the store and bought all new stuff-a new rod and reel. New line... New hooks, bobbers, sinkers, jigs and colorful plastic bait. I stood there in simple-minded ecstasy trying to chose between the fuzzy chartreuse thingamajigs and the iridescent purple whuchumucallits.

What the heck. It was crappie season in Minnesota. I bought them both, along with a lot of other colors. Throw in the boat rental, live bait, and snacks and my buddy and I were out more than two hundred dollars before we left the dock. Undaunted, we motored to a likely spot, dropped anchor and started to fish.

One hour and no crappies later, my buddy reached for his I-phone, called the office, and walked into a big crisis. He had to go in. The trip was over. No crappies.

We'll be back, though. We have to go back. I've got all this new equipment now. And we've got a big investment to make good on.

The next crappie we catch will have cost us more than two hundred dollars. But the one after that will halve the cost, and so on, and so forth. Every fish will drive our costs down.

"Look at it the glass-half-full, Dale Carnegie way," I keep telling my wife, "We're just two hundred and some crappies away from paying a low, low, dollar-a-fish."