There were strict rules. The most important rule: Announce your cast. When I heard, “Casting Daddy,” I was on full alert. In the bow of the canoe, my three-year-old son sat swinging a wooden minnow armed with razor-sharp treble hooks.
Fishing with children is a long-term investment. Successful investors know that to achieve higher returns in the long run, you have to accept short-term risk. Like, say, a hook in the arm.
The fishing industry also knows the value of investing in children at a young age, and the earlier the better. Someone who comes to fishing at age 10 will spend far more over his lifetime than someone who takes up fishing in his twenties. The earlier you have a rod in your hand, the more avid you’re likely to be and the later in life you’re likely to fish. Not to mention you will be more likely to take your own children or grandchildren fishing—investing in another generation.
Both my kids have had their own rods and tackle from an early age. One of their favorite parts of fishing is sorting and choosing lures. So far, five-year-old Kate chooses her hard plastic baits by color. She’ll ask me to put on the cute pink one or little Blue Betty. Sorting and organizing their tackle is part of the experience. Sure it’s expensive, but still cheaper and better money spent than Wii Hooked! Real Motion Fishing.
Throwing blue and silver minnow lures into shady eddies on our home river isn’t like feeding worms to sunfish on a cane pole. In the beginning, Doug would hang onto his rod for a couple turns of the reel but never long enough to get a frisky smallmouth bass anywhere near the gunwales. “Dad… Dad… HELP!”
Fishing with kids can be tedious and stressful. But with vision and patience, there are huge paybacks. And not everything along the way needs to be reinvested; there are certainly dividends, payouts worth more than cash, stock or property.
Last summer, when Doug was six, we stumbled on the best river bass fishing I’d ever experienced. Bass were jumping at our lures dangling over the side of the canoe.
Rules be damned. Without warning, Doug fired a perfect cast to the far side of a large, deep eddy. A smallmouth hit his Rapala and shot out of the water shaking furiously. It was pretty clear to Doug, and to me, he was in for the fight of his little life.
I set down my rod and began to crawl over the canoe packs, tackle trays and blue barrels, expecting him to hand me his rod. He was losing line faster than his fingers could reel it in.
“Pass over your rod, Doug,” I suggested.
He jammed the butt of the rod in his belly button below his PFD, leaned back bracing his feet against the gunwales and started cranking like an offshore fisherman battling an angry marlin.
“No way, Dad. Get the net, I’m going to land this mother!”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
