The Mowed Bonsai: #66: Fishing with the Family

We returned two days later to Hebo Lake after getting in some practice.

I used to fish a lot as a kid. Somehow I stopped doing it. I was thinking recently about when and why. I decided it really came to a halt when I went off to college to live in the dorms. There's something about being packed off from childhood to live in a small cube. You can only take and fit so much stuff in that cube, and, if you're like me, you are suddenly without wheels and space after spending high school having wheels and space. A gear-intensive and car-requiring hobby like fishing gets hard to maintain.

Plus, I was 18 and I wanted to meet new people and hopefully have sex with some of them and I wasn't sure that geeking around fishing was "cool" for college. (Whereas I was of the mind that drinking to oblivion on rotgut beer in dark smoky rooms was a way to the mountaintop. Go figure.) And then, like, none of my friends in college fished.

So: I quit fishing. Regret it to this day, but there you go.

So in recent years I've kinda started back up, at least with crabbing and crawdads, some clamming, mussels, and an occasional deep sea charter.

But that was all kind of just me. This year we decided to make it a thing that we would go fishing as a family, and turn the kids on to it. We finally geared up and set out for our maiden voyage last week during Spring Break.

It turned out to be the first time Ashley's really fished, with the first ever fishing pole she can call her own, and she calmly landed five trout. My mom hauled in one, using Pete's kid's rod, which works just fine. I caught none, but spent most of my time scrambling around, yanking out the hooks, bleeding the fish, and tending to the bait and tackle.