Take your kid fishing

Take your kid fishing

From the day my son, Jeffery, was born I had dreamed of the day I could take him fishing. And when he turned 2, I started taking him along every once in a while. Of course I couldn’t fish when I had him with me. I constantly had to watch Jeffery and make sure he didn’t throw anything overboard, although he did manage to dispose of my favorite fishing rod and one of his bottles. Oh well, he’ll learn it some day. The most important thing, however, was that he and I had fun being out in the boat together.

Since Jeffery, and probably most 2-year-olds, didn’t have the patience to just sit there and watch the bobber, I had to find a way to fish that would allow him to keep moving the rod. He just loved to dip the tip of the rod into the water, up and down. So I thought he might be able to do some jigging. I would cast out about 20 feet near a bridge and then I just give him the pole.

All of a sudden he started reeling in and said: “Jeffery got big fishy!” And I didn’t think much of it as he had played that game many times before. After countless hours of watching fishing videos with me and practicing on the sofa, he did know how to set the hook and reel in. I was pretty surprised when I saw that he really had a fish on the hook. Just a little crappie, but you should have seen the smile on his face! Jeffery insisted on throwing the fish back in the water and in all the excitement I even forgot to take a picture.

He caught a few more that day and we had a heck of a time. But I it seemed that my son was a catch-and-release kinda guy. I would have liked to take some home to eat, but he made sure we threw them all back in.

On later fishing trips we caught some catfish and bass, but Jeffery was a true catch-and-release fisherman. I’ve tired all kinds of reasons to convince him to take a fish home. “We need to show mommy.” or “That’s a mean fish, he bit me.”, but it didn’t work. And even though he did like to eat fried catfish, and knew it was catfish when he ate it, when I went fishing with my son, he made me practice catch-and-release.

For me, a catch-and-eat fisherman, it’s not easy to put a nice-sized fish back in the water, but having my son along with me is better than keeping the biggest fish in the world. So if you have kids, take them fishing, but be prepared to put some or all fish back in the water. Just take your kids fishing and you’ll have a good time!

Photo credit: photo by me, Daniel