Enjoy the ride by fishing with friends

I am a sucker for a prank, even when it's played on me.

Pranks were part of my cousin Earl's daily makeup, especially when he stopped by to have coffee, conversation, and also on those early days when we joined my father on Pistakee Lake for a half day of crappie and white bass fishing.

We always went to Pinkie Harrison's den of iniquity, where my late father and Tommy Harrison would start the morning with strong coffee and "eye openers."

Earl and I waited outside, and he enjoyed taking all the line off my treasured spinning reel. Of course, I never noticed its absence until I went to cast a lure to a surfacing school of fish. Even if I never looked at the reel, all I had to see was the wide smirk on Earl's face as he sat in the middle of a boat my father had rented.

I miss those times with Earl, who died some years ago.

I got the late Mike Seeling, the former photo chief for the Daily Herald, interested in fly-fishing many years ago and we had a lot of fun traveling throughout North America.

I took Mike to the No-Name River on a secluded offshoot of the North Seal River in the sub-Arctic of Northern Manitoba. As we stood on a very shaky casting platform of huge boulders, I handed Seeling a couple tiny bluegill poppers and told him to make long casts with his fly rod to the far edge of the current. He didn't believe a bluegill popper would catch anything up there.

Then, as he started to lift the fly line from the water, a beautiful Arctic grayling grabbed the popper and jumped into the air. Between his yelling and laughing, Seeling let his fly rod wear down that fish until he could lift it out of the water.

His small tape measure marked the fish at 20 inches, a trophy catch in anyone's book. But like everything we caught (except a few walleyes for shore lunch), this battler was released back into the icy water. We caught a dozen more in about a two-hour period.

Seeling died last March after joining Spence Petros and Ken Kortas on a fabulous jumbo redfish outing to Venice, La.

Another friend, Harvey Klene, used to join me to night fish for largemouth bass on Bangs Lake. One night we threw nothing but weedless frogs into the heavy morass that graces much of the shorelines there.

We caught more than 30 big, hungry bass that night. It was one of our best evening adventures ever. Harvey needed a liver transplant. He never got it and passed away in Nevada.

Les Madelstein fished with me on the area ponds. Every bass he caught evoked never-ending laughter. He went with me to the land of jumbo smallmouth bass, the Menomonee River in Wisconsin, where he caught his first 6-pound bronzeback. He kept talking about that battle until he fell asleep in the cabin. Les passed away after a long battle with heart disease.

Those friendships came back to me when I recently climbed into my new fishing boat while it sat in my garage. I thought about many of the fishing and hunting adventures that helped paint my life's canvas.

And then I remembered what my father told me right after he had some major surgery.

"Make every second, every trip count," Irv whispered, "as if it's your last adventure. Laugh your way through life with close friends. You'll be a better person."

The cycle continues:

It happens every time a new IDNR director is named to the job - internal agency rumblings, a mix of nervousness as well as cautious optimism. Facing Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner's budget scythe, veteran DNR employees aren't sure how effective they can be in their jobs. At issue for anyone interested in the outdoors is where the chips fall regarding state conservation programs.

• Contact Mike Jackson at angler88@comcast.net, catch his radio show 7-9 a.m. Sundays on WGCO 1590-AM (live-streamed at www.1590WCGO.com) and get more content at www.mikejacksonoutdoors.com.