Ron Schara: We're but days away from opener

Waiting for the opener is both a wonderful yearning and one of the most awful things a Minnesota angler must endure. It's almost worse than clinch knot failures or writing checks to the IRS.

A case in point: I start anticipating the opener ... oh, shortly after deer season ends in November and another autumn of bird hunting is history.

And it doesn't end.

On warm days in December, I'll head to the garage to sort lures, learn new fishing knots or just hang out with fishing stuff.

My wife doesn't understand. If the phone rings for me, she answers and says I'm in the garage playing with my toys.

In the subzero days of January and February, I mostly just look longingly at my lineup of fishing rods. They stand there like patient soldiers waiting for the next walleye wars.

It's a painful experience surveying the fishing tools of summer. When it's 10 below, a tackle box looks like something from outer space.

In March when it's warm enough to melt snow, I'll make a few practice casts in the driveway and hope the neighbors didn't see me fishing on asphalt.

In April, my itch for the opener is scratched a little by the chance to wet a line on the Mississippi River below the dam at Red Wing. A few April days also are spent chasing wild turkeys, which you must do before the crack of dawn. Rising the middle of the night to hunt turkeys tends to deaden your fishing mindset, but opening day sickness quickly returns.

Fishing fever, they call it. Minnesotans tend to be sick a lot.

You wanna fish, but you can't.

You wanna sit in a fishing boat, rocking gently. You wanna reach into the minnow bucket and make a cast without wearing mittens.

You yearn for water in a form that doesn't groan as ice but laps to the song of loons.

You crave the wonderful feel of a walleye strike on your orange-chartreuse 1/16th-ounce jig adorned with a fathead minnow that is wiggling on your behalf.

Memories of openers past bounce in your mind like a walleye chop. Fast bites and slow bites. You can be an expert one opener and a dimwit the next.

Who could forget last year's opener, when Bro' Robert caught the largest walleye of the weekend and earned the right to wear the Walleye Master Jacket and sign his name on the sleeve.

Bro' Robert was so happy to be the Schara opening day champion that he became delirious, claiming it finally proved he was the best walleye fisherman in the family. Poor Bro' Robert -- wins and thinks he's a walleye gill net.

One of these openers, I'll be awarded the Walleye Master Jacket, I'm sure. If so, I'll try to act like I've worn it before.

There's something else I think about as another opener nears.

You wonder how many openers you have left? There's no way of knowing, of course. Probably the best course is to cherish every Minnesota opener.

And I do.

If only they weren't so darned far apart.

Ron Schara is a retired Star Tribune outdoors columnist. • ron@mnbound.com