Fishing with kids aint it great!!
I took a buddy of mine and his two boys, 11 and 5, fishing and shirmping yesterday. We started out shirmping, I through net for about 5 minutes and caught about 3 quarts of shrimp. The 11 year old was fascinated with the cast net so I showed him how to through it and he caught about 10 shrimp in as many casts, he was thrilled. His little brother, 5 years old, just couldn’t figure out how to pick up the shrimp without getting stuck with those barbs so he stomped a couple of them out. Those little guys had enough of shrimping after those 10 casts from the ll year old.
We moseyed on down the river and decided to start fishing, out of the way so as not to upset anyone else fishing. We threw out a couple of lines for trout and a couple on the bottom for whatever. The 5 year old was enamored with popping the bobber for trout, he would pop it then it would get closer to him and he would try to pop it again it wouldn’t pop then he would get frustrated. We showed him how to pop the bobber and real in the slack so it would pop, then we had to cast it out for him constantly. His brother liked fishing on the bottom, we liked him fishing on the bottom because we didn’t have to through his line out that much. Next thing you know they’ve got a double, they are jumping up and down hollering and razing sand because there is something on the end of their line. They get what they have on the end of their lines up to the surface and low and behold they both caught stingrays. They start screaming and crying because they thought their dad and I were going to get killed because, “Those stingrays killed the Crocodile Hunter and we aren’t near as tuff as the Crocodile Hunter.” We finally convinced them that we weren’t going to get killed and took the stingrays off their hooks. They wanted to kill the stingrays for what they did to the Crocodile Hunter but we didn’t let them.
As soon as we got done dealing with that dilemma, a bald eagle flew up beside us. It was awesome the bald eagle swooped down and caught a fish 10 yards from the boat. It was the first bald eagle my 41 year old buddy or his kids had ever seen in the wild. All of us were fascinated at the sight especially the 5 year old. After the eagle caught the fish he perched up on the channel marker and ate his fish, we watched him for about 15 minutes. We decided to take a closer look and anchored about 15 yards from the channel marker.
This is when the bottle nosed dolphins showed up. The two boys had never been that close to wild bottle nosed dolphins. So I diced to through them a shrimp, I know I shouldn’t have been feeding wild dolphins but, those boys thought it was the coolest thing on earth. They decided to start feeding the dolphins the majority of the 3 quarts of shrimp we had caught, and yes the little one figured out real quick how to grab up a shrimp and feed it to a dolphin. They couldn’t stop talking about feeding the dolphins. After this we packed up and headed for the dock.
Once we got everything loaded up and in the truck those two boys couldn’t quit telling us about seeing the bald eagle catch a fish, and feeding shrimp to the dolphins. They were telling us about it like we weren’t just with them when all of this happened. I learned yesterday that fishing with kid’s aint all about catching fish. We came back with a quart of shrimp, no fish, and two little boys whose lives had been changed for ever. When you spend 6 hours on a boat with 2 little boys and get back to the dock with nothing but a quart of shrimp and smiles that big, it was dang a good day.
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