I was helping my friend out with a digging chore when I came over to his place to borrow a trowel. Sim is a retired mason and is always willing to lend a hand to any neighbor in need.

It just happened that he had hurt his hand doing some carpentry and needed a favor this time. As fate would have it I wandered along and I was the best option that he had on that morning.

Anyway, as I turned a few spades of dirt onto a pile we kept running into night crawlers and they would wiggle down into the loose soil time after time as I added more soil to the pile.

Well, Sim is an old walleye fisherman from way back and the sight of those worms wiggling away was too much for him to bear.

He spoke up and said, “Hold on there Jay…I need to get my bait can in the garage!”

Sim came out of the garage with an old coffee can with a plastic lid and headed right for that dirt pile.

I felt like I was in a Mark Twain book as Sim directed Huck to turn over another scoop of the rich soil to find the crawlers. “This is kind of fun and we get some bait too!” said Sim.

The job wasn’t so bad and we had a few worms but not nearly enough for a day on Pymatuning Lake. Sim and I turned that chore into a day on the lake on the upcoming Saturday for his famous “fish ‘til we bust trips!”

Sim is known for packing a lunch and making the most of his day on the water.

It was fast approaching Saturday and I was in charge of finding enough crawlers for both of us to fish with for a day.

I decided to go with my neighborhood kids and contract the job out for 10 dozens juicy crawlers.

I was driving along when I saw Brodie and his crew walking down the road by his home.

I pulled up beside them and told them that I had an order to be filled by Saturday.

They thought it could be done and told me that I would get a call when it was ready to be picked up. The kids were true to their word and a nice ice cream bucket of worms was ready for me a few days later.

Sim was elated when I showed off the bucket of worms and he started divvying up the worms into two containers.

All of a sudden he stopped the transfer process and put 4-5 dozen in an old refrigerator for another day saying, “If we need more than what we have I’ll be surprised.” Not to be too easy on him my reply was “We will see.”

We loaded up the rest of our gear and headed for the lake.

The drive was uneventful and the lake was busy with spring anglers trying to get on the water and taking advantage of the beautiful weekends that Western Pennsylvania has been experiencing.

We decided to drift fish and let the wind put us on a course off the weed beds and into some walleyes.

We used floating jig heads in greens, blacks and orange.

To these we added a slip sinker and a juicy night crawler.

The weight kept the presentation down on the bottom and the floating jig kept the crawler off the bottom about a foot.

It didn’t take long for both of us to get some hits from the local fish population. Sim said to me, “Well we might as well put $5 on the biggest fish.”

I told him he was on and we both started to fish in earnest.

Perch, bluegill, white bass and a large mouth bass started to hound us and eat our crawlers.

Finally, I had a hit that was pretty solid and the first walleye of the day came into our boat.

He wasn’t a wall hanger and the “golden rule” placed him just under the legal limit of 15 inches.

He went back into the lake and we had a discussion of how a fisherman could tell if a walleye was legal just by the changes in their girth after they hit 16 inches in length or more.

I reminded Sim that legal or not he was still the $5 fish thus far.

I should have remembered the old fable of the tortoise and the hare because Sim started to land some walleye.

The next fish caused Sim to yell to me to get the net!

Old Huck got the net and was able to scoop up a walleye longer than the golden rule could measure.

Sim looked at me with a grin and said, “Now that’s a five dollar fish!”

The day was busy and we landed 12 walleye but only four legal fish, the ledger told the story Sim 4, Jay 0.

I wasn’t giving up yet and I was determined to get a bigger walleye before we left the lake.

I didn’t realize that fate was controlled by a bucket of night crawlers as we both declared that bait was getting low and the other half of our bait was chilling in Sim’s refrigerator.

I was foiled and realized that the early bird doesn’t always get the worm.

Until we meet again, bring plenty of bait and do something nice for Dad on Father’s Day!

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle.