This morning I welcomed U.S. Army Captain Sean Hayball and his son, Joshua, aboard for a trip focused on making Joshua successful.

Joshua caught his personal best big fish today with this 14.25″ largemouth bass.

Joshua has accompanied the family on previous fishing excursions before, but those efforts tended to devolve into wet-wading, rock throwing and “souvenir” collecting.  So, now at the age of 6 1/2, it was time to try again with a little more intentionality.

Before we got going, I shared a few things with Sean about the approach I would take, which was to focus on instant gratification, include plenty of transitions, and monitor for signs that the novelty was wearing off whatever we were currently engaged in.

The white bass bite has been “funky” as I explained in my previous post.  So, having observed this early in the week and having seen no significant change in the weather to bring about a change to this situation, we focused on sunfish and dabbled with largemouth bass on bait.

We found plenty of sunfish in and along the edge of the shallow hydrilla which was just placed an additional 1.8 feet underwater by our recent incoming runoff, and boated exactly 24 of them in just two stops on slipcorks and maggots.

Once the appetite to boat and handle a few fish was satisfied, we’d ease out into open water to gun for some white bass and largemouth.  We only picked up on white bass by sight casting to a surface-feeding school, and we missed another early on the downriggers.  We also only picked up one largemouth bass after missing our first 3 opportunities due to some rookie mistakes.

Long story short, even in a very tough fishing period Sean and I worked together to make a very positive, successful, memorable event for Joshua.  Then, when we saw he was about mentally checked out of the fishing mode for the morning, we called an end to the trip, thus finishing on a strong, positive note.  This kind of experience makes kids eager to return for more and it the kind of thing that assures dads of having a fishing buddy for life.

Thank you, Sharon, for setting the guys up for success, and, “Good job, Joshua, on your big fish!”.

 

 

 

Start Time: 6:30a

End Time: 11:20a

** Vicinity of Area 1098 and 189 for sunfish
** Vicinity of Area 124/125 for largemouth