A Fishing Story

Sometime last week I heard on the radio that Saturday would be free fishing day in the state of Vermont. Despite fishing all of the time when we were kids I haven’t really done anything in twenty years or more. I dug through the garage and found the old tackle box and fishing pole from some 20yrs ago and brought it inside.

Z: “What is that? Can I have it?”
M: “This is for fishing, I was thinking we could go this weekend.”
Z: “Can we go now?”

He knows fishing, pretty well actually, from episodes of Curious George but that’s still nothing like seeing a tray full of dirty hooks and lures and tangled leaders. The pole had no fishing line (how’d that happen?) so he informed me that I need to go RIGHT NOW to buy some. I said we had plenty of time, but each day he would ask to see if I’d got it yet. By Friday I had and we spent some time learning to cast and wind. A chipmunk came out to watch, so Zane tried to catch that.

Finally Saturday arrived and it was time to fish!

Ok, I don’t know what I was expecting from a five year old, but he didn’t spend a lot of the time actually fishing. The first place we went there were a couple other (bored) kids with their grandpa so all of them wandered around getting into things. The little girl (via her Grandpa) caught a big lake rainbow trout, but that was the only bite anyone had.

After that we had to get lunch, play at a playground, and then tried to find another fishing hole closer to home. Eventually I gave up on the White River and we drove down to Quechee, scene of the big flood last year. Supposedly some people had caught bass so I started trying to catch one while Zane did advanced experiments in turning hands-full of mud into dirt (“disappearing the mud” he said). After a half hour we caught a nice sized bass, Zane poked at it a bit, then went back to his mud. Eventually I realized this was the last fish we were going to find and we headed home.

Via YouTube I took a crash course on filleting a bass, which worked very nicely. To pan fry it I decided on corn meal with salt & pepper, but it turned out to be more like corn grits, way to big and coarse. Zane said he didn’t like the fish, “yuck!” Faith and I thought it was great. Out of curiosity I pulled the corn grits off had him try it and he loved the fish too. You can never tell what a “yuck” is for.