Finding A Fresh Angle Dick Lee Remains A Student Of Fishing After Years Of Study

Aging anglers have a choice to do whatever they want with their fishing prowess. But it’s rare to see them abuse such discretion.

Dick Lee, for example, could be dangerous. He could, if he desired, devote every waking hour to fishing.

While most anglers are toiling through a 40-hour work week, Lee has the decades of experience it takes to catch a limit of walleyes every day. But he doesn’t.

The 71-year-old retired concrete finisher reluctantly recalls the years he would have bonked fish with abandon if he’d had the chance.

“I was a working stiff, but when the peak of the steelhead run would come around, I’d take off no matter what was going on,” Lee said. “I’d tell the boss I’d be back in a week if he still wanted me.”

The first thing Lee and his bride did after their wedding decades ago? You guessed it: They went fishing.

“The other part came later,” he said.

Lee recalls smearing concrete all day, then staying up all night to melt lead and pour his own crappie jigs.

“I still stay up late making tackle once in a while,” he said. “But now it makes me tired.”

Going fishing with Dick Lee might not fill your freezer as full as it would have 30 years ago. But the experience could fill voids in your soul.

“Every day I go, it’s the best fishing I’ve ever had,” he said as he launched his boat at Lake Roosevelt’s Porcupine Bay. “Today will be the best day since yesterday.”

Lee went fishing that day without the excess baggage of a bloated ego. The era of competition is behind him.

He started as a kid using a tree branch and kite string with the goal of simply catching a fish.

Rapidly he progressed to the “gotta catch a lot of fish” stage.

“I didn’t know the first thing about conservation until I came out west in the 50s,” he said. “In my greedy days, I can remember three times I filled a 5-gallon bucket with crappies. Can you imagine that? I did it three times before I realized how stupid it was.”

Then came the “gotta catch a BIG fish” stage - a brief but intense developmental period.

“I like to think I can get along with anyone,” Lee said. “But I don’t like liars, and there’s something about the obsession with big fish that makes men lie.”

Today Lee is in the enviable advanced stages of anglerhood.

“I once had 40 or 50 rods, but I’ve whittled it down to 23,” he said.”That’s a little more reasonable.”

“My boat is small and beat up, but I’m getting old, too. The boat doesn’t leak, yet. It’s all I need.”

He cut the engine to let the boat drift. Then he cast a plastic grub and jigged it off the mud bottom.

“Talk to me,” he said, his attention riveted to the rod and the walleye mouthing the bait below. He jerked the rod back, but the fish escaped.

“I have nothing to prove anymore, so I can enjoy fishing even when I get skunked,” he said, making another cast.

That doesn’t mean he’s ever been content with the deterioration of Northwest fisheries.

“I often think back to our great family vacations,” he said. “We’d take a month and travel to the coast. We’d go bottomfishing in Oregon, salmon fishing in Westport, clam digging and blackberry picking on the Olympic Peninsula. Poor people could live like kings back then.

“I don’t even bother telling young people what the fishing used to be like. They don’t believe me.”

While most anglers his age are interested only in the fishing part of fishing, Dick Lee is never far from the issues.

He’s on Washington’s sportfishing advisory council, traveling at his own expense to Olympia to help government sort out the countless issues facing fish.

More than 20 years ago, he was trying to apply common fishing sense to the hydro-power plans for Lower Granite Dam.

“I was one of the fishermen who wrote about what the Corps of Engineers was doing to salmon and steelhead on the Snake River,” he said. “But nobody listened. Now it’s too late. Now all we can do is say we told you so.”

Lee conducts numerous fishing clinics for clubs and events each year, but he frowns on being called a fishing expert.

“I’m a student of fishing,” he said. “That’s the only way it could remain interesting for all these years.”

Lee appreciates all disciplines of angling, although every type isn’t for him.

“Downriggers are an excellent way to catch fish,” he said. “But I’m not fishing if I don’t have a rod in my hand.”

His top tip for people who can’t catch walleyes: “Fish at night.”

He pointed to a bend in the Spokane Arm of Lake Roosevelt that created a large eddy.

“Some moments you never forget,” he said. “That’s where I caught a 10-pounder.”

Similarly, he’ll never forget the woman who came to him the day after one of his fishing seminars.

“She told me she went out on the lake after the seminar and caught her first walleye,” he said. “She was excited, but only half as excited as I was.”

Lee generously discloses many of his best fishing spots to beginners. But not all of them.

“I still have one I call Solitude,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Getting hooked Dick Lee teaches spring fishing courses through the Spokane Community Colleges and Spokane Parks and Recreation Department. He also has a standing offer to provide free fishing clinics to non-profit organizations. Contact him by telephone at 534-9581.