Variety and Hands-On Tasks — the Keys to Fishing with Kids, 51 Fish, 20 June 2013






This evening I fished on Stillhouse with 6 1/2 year old Steven M., his dad, Josh M., and Josh’s father-in-law, Steve C., visiting from Alaska.


From L to R. Grandpa Steve, little Steven, and Josh with the largest 5 white bass we boated via downrigging this evening.


Josh’s wife, Stephanie, was behind-the-scenes (aren’t all moms?) making the reservations, taking care of logistics, and keeping everyone on schedule for this week’s events which included a family trip to Great Wolf Lodge near Dallas, and this evening’s fish adventure. Thanks, mom!!

As you can imagine, the patience and attention span of a 6 year old are both pretty short, so, I planned to have some variety and I planned to make things as hands-on as I could to try to keep young Steven’s interest and make the trip enjoyable for the “big boys”, too.

As we began, we downrigged for white bass over 40+ feet of water in the vicinity of Area 886/887. Fish were suspended down around 26 feet and were a bit tentative here. We lost 2 fish before boating our first — a white bass, followed by a freshwater drum. I thought we could find some better action than this, so, we moved on.

We headed to between Areas 671 and 1222 and found abundant bait and active white bass in the lower third of the water column. We got our tandem-rigged Pet Spoons working and stayed hooked up for over an hour and a half, landing singles and doubles of white bass over and over again. Everyone got to share in the action, but, even though the fishing was going well, eventually the novelty wore off for young Steven and he announced, “I think I’m done.” It was time for some variety.

We broke out some red Gatorade for snacking, and then changed our gameplan. We headed up shallow to Area 1098 to fish for sunfish using a pole with a slipfloat and maggots. I only had to “demo” this one time for Steven before he got the hang of it and began boating his own bluegill and longear sunfish one after another. After a total of 10 fish caught here over the span of about 30 minutes, that novelty also wore thin.

We then talked Steven into letting dad and grandpa catch a few more “big ones”, and then promised to take him on in. To make it interesting, despite the fact that we could have returned to Area 621/1222 and kept right on catching fish, we instead took a “fast” boat ride to the other side of the lake to search out fish in another area. Fortunately, this worked out as we found yet more active white bass down around 19-22 feet at Area 1221/660. We boated a final 5 more white bass here before “nature called” to Steven, and we decided this would be a good time to call it a good day and head on back in.

We boated a total of 51 fish on this slightly abbreviated outing — 1 drum, 10 sunfish, and 40 white bass.


TALLY = 51 FISH, all caught and released

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TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 4:45p

End Time: 8:00p

Air Temp: 94F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: 84.2F

Wind: Winds were S15 tapering down to S12.