Now we do the opposite thing. On pleasant sunny mornings we don’t go fishing, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Because they are NOT going to soccer practice or T-ball or to get their nails done.
We waited till we had a Sunday evening with rain in the forecast, then we gathered the kids – Little Smokey and Johnny.
Now these kids don’t use kids rods – the kind that come in Spiderman or Barbie packaging. They use adult rods because we don’t want them to learn the wrong muscle memory they would learn if they had that thumb-actuated spincast. A LOT of kids do not graduate from spincast Barbie.
And we’re trying to teach them that fishing is serious business.
Little Smokey is 7 and she has been casting an adult spinning rig by herself since she was 5. Her brother, Johnny (5), has been casting an adult spinning rig by himself since he was three-years-old. And they fly-fish too, with adult fly rods.
Anyway, we take them trout fishing a lot because we are trying to instill in them the skills and the disciplines they will need if they are going to be successful fishermen.
Little Smokey knows there is one bait rig that outfishes EVERYTHING else. At least in the lakes and ponds she has fished a lot.
It’s a yellow plastic soft bead, scented like sweet corn and we put a dab of Pro-Cure’s Trophy Trout on it. The bead is impaled on a single red Daiichi egg hook, Usually a No. 8, sometimes smaller. The leader length is something like 30 inches but we stretch that for weedy waters. We use a sliding bullet sinker so the trout doesn’t feel the resistance of the weight.
When we arrived at one of our favorite little trout ponds, there was no one else. It was raining. It was Sunday evening. It was perfect. There are four places where the fish go when the water is high and we found them quickly with the glare glasses.
Our objective this time was to work on netting skills. I explained the concepts again. The kid with the trout on should fight the fish at the water’s edge then slowly back up. The kid with the net should ease in close and put the net in the water and allow the other kid to steer the fish into the net. Easier explained, apparently, then absorbed. Little Smokey insists that if we are using bait that she puts Pro-Cure on it.
Gary Lewis is host of Frontier Unlimited and is the author of John Nosler Going Ballistic and other titles. To contact Gary, visit www.garylewisoutdoors.com
