The first time I met Eric in person....
As you guys know I spend most of my time on the water chasing muskies. A couple years ago I had the go ahead from my wife to spend Saturday on the water. My buddy that normally fishes with me calls me Friday evening and says he just got called out to work and wouldn't be able to go. I still wanted to go but didn't have anyone as a backup plus it was getting late. I figured what the heck and posted here on WVAngler that I wanted to go and my back seat was open. Within 20 minutes of posting Eric and I were on the phone making plans. At this point Eric had never fished for Kanawha river muskies. We decided on the upper Kanawha and planned to meet the next morning.
4am Saturday morning I pull into the South Charleston Bob Evans and Eric was already there. He jumps out of his truck and says "hi Jeff I'm Eric" he grabs his rods tosses them in my boat and off we go. We talk a bit going up the road about muskies and how we had high hopes for the day. The first few hours on the water were fairly quite but as the day went on we spoke of baseball and his time at WV state. We also talked about him getting ready to attend the Trooper academy. Mostly though he couldn't get over fishing the big river making the super long casts or working a dropoff or some off shore structure. He just couldn't get over how different it was then fishing the Elk. By the end of the day we had raised a few fish and even though we never boated one we had became buddies.
This spring I had posted some photos of some lures that I had made. Eric quickly posted back looking for something specific. He had a hunch about a color but couldn't find what he wanted anywhere so he asked if I could custom make the color. I said sure. A couple weeks later I sent him a photo of what I had come up with and he loved it. We were having a hard time getting together with our schedules and just kept putting it off. We both figured we had all the time in the world and there was no hurry. I wish that were true. Eric never got to test his custom color on the Elk muskies. I don't fish the Elk much but I just might this fall to see if he was on to something with this color.
Jeff Cantley "spinnerbayt", South Charleston, WV
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