With the Hoosiers trying to score a basket on his big screen TV, Steve Bunjan carefully attaches the white “legs” to an orange “spider” fishing fly. He doesn’t miss a beat – in the game or in the tiny fishing lure he is creating.
Lake Monroe flows lazily along outside his large family room window. Down a grassy hill is Steve’s boat dock where a 19-foot Sylvan Excursion fishing boat waits for him to climb aboard.
After 41 years in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, the living is easy in Bloomington, home of Indiana University. When Bunjan isn’t fishing, he’s likely planning to go or making his own fishing lures.
“He’s been fishing ever since he was old enough to hold a fishing pole in his hands,” wife Rose Mary says. “I’ll go fishing with him but I sit in the boat and read magazines.”
After discovering the joys of fly fishing, Steve perfected his cast and fished whenever and wherever he could. At the Gary steel mill, Steve and his buddies found the ideal fly. Called the Michigan Spider, the fly was made of sponge and came in colors of orange, yellow, green, white and black.
“We were happy campers,” he recalls. “Then something changed. They started making the baits in China. The sponge slid down the hook and we were missing fish left and right.”
MAKING HIS OWN LURES
If he couldn’t buy the perfect fly, Steve decided he would make his own. For his flies, Steve decided to use sturdy and cheap flip-flops. He devised a tool that would cut “spider” bodies from the colorful sandals. He already had a fly-tying vise so Steve was set to go.
“My spiders were an immediate success,” he says. “My friends were ecstatic. They had baits that worked and worked … One of my friends had caught 75 fish on one bait. It was still together but kind of chewed up.”
Years passed and Steve got even more adept at making flies and at fishing. In 1980, one of Steve’s steel worker friends asked if he would tie 10 baits as a gift for Coach Bob Knight at Indiana University.
The friend’s aunt worked at IU so she gave the gift to the coach’s secretary. Suddenly Steve got a phone call from Bob Knight’s secretary. The gift box of flies didn’t have the name of the giver, only the name of Steve’s fly company. “Coach wanted to know who sent them so he could thank them.”
Coach Knight also wanted to order three dozen orange spiders with white legs and to have the bill sent to him. Instead, Steve filled the order and said he didn’t want any payment, just an autographed photo of the coach. Steve not only got the photo, he also received an IU hat, -T-shirt and an invitation to go to an IU basketball game as Coach Knight’s guest.
FISHING WITH BOB KNIGHT
That was the beginning of a long friendship between the two men. The first time Coach Knight called Steve, it was to tell him how much he enjoyed using the spiders.
“He remarked how he valued the baits so much he climbed a tree and waded in water to retrieve a misguided cast,” Steve says with a laugh.
One of the things that Knight likes best about the bait, Steve says, is that it doesn’t need to be cleaned and dried between catches – a time-consuming chore with other baits.
“Most baits must be cleaned from fish slime, dried by whipping the fly in the air and then adding a flotation solution of some kind,” Steve says.
“Coach wants to catch as many fish as he can in allotted time,” he says. “With my bait, he releases the fish he has caught and his next move is casting for the next trout or gill.”
Over the years, the two fishermen grew closer in their shared love of fly fishing and basketball. “My wife and I would sit in the seats behind the team in Assembly Hall for home games,” Steve says. “Then Coach would call me up and we’d go fishing together.”
Since Steve likes to cook at home and on fishing expeditions, Coach Knight nicknamed him “Cookie.” Steve sells his flies from his Website www.buglikeflycompany.com. Or customers can email him at sjbunjan@msn.com.
Every year, Steve makes a special set of flies for his buddy. “One of his favorite baits is one of my new creations, a lime-colored reverse cone head. I give him one fly for each year of his life,” Steve says.
“This year I sent him 71 baits … Sometimes it doesn’t seem real. I never dreamed that I would have Coach Bob Knight’s personal cell phone number.”
Last year on a fishing trip with Coach Knight to the Northern Rockies Lodge in British Columbia, Steve caught his biggest fish ever.
“It was an 18-pound Northern Pike on a fly rod,” he says, adding almost unnecessarily. “And it was on a fly I made.”
Comments