The Experience Continues

[Zig]

Somewhere between coning the hubs on BSA wheels and doing the final alignment test run on my son's Pinewood derby car, I heard the words, "When are we going to that warmwater place again?"
When these words are spoken, by anyone, within the confines of our household it means only one thing - someone's going fishing.

I took my oldest along on yet another exploratory trip to the warmwater discharge from a local power generating plant. This waterway gets quite a bit of angling pressure for smallmouth and walleye, yet very little for bluegill or rockbass.
My last trip consisted of low water and massive quantities of falling water, so I figured a sunny afternoon would at least take one, less then ideal, condition out of the equation.
This is shore angling with a good deal of chest deep wading thrown in for good measure, or at least necessary to achieve the needed angle to drift baits along the numerous seams and ledges. ZZ (my oldest) didn't have waders, so we used the next best option we had - his snow boots. Armed with a vest full of jigs and small crankbaits, we started at a location a few hundred yards downstream of the actual discharge. I wish I could say we had the place to ourselves, but the scenery looked more like an ESPN commercial then a postcard of solitude.
I situated ZZ on a rock that gave him a little extra casting distance for the jointed Rapala he chose to use. After I felt he was secure enough to fend for himself, I started wading upstream from him. This move was done to accomplish two things: 1) I was hoping the disturbance I made as I walked may stimulate some feeding activity in front of his postion, and 2) I wanted to be able to make a quartering upstream cast with the 1/32oz. spinner jig/twister combo I was starting with along a downed tree trunk.
After a few casts, I realized the water I was fishing wasn't anything more then a large flat that didn't even come above my knees. The current break the tree created didn't show anything for my efforts, so I turned back to tell ZZ we needed to move on. As soon as I turned, I saw him set the hook.
No sooner did the image register in my mind, I heard, "Daddy, I got one!"

It's quite amusing at times to see the excitement of a young angler. Here was one that had just hooked up with a fish that instantly drew the attention from those anglers closest to him, (it didn't hit me until after the picture was taken that I hadn't seen anyone else catching anything), reeling for all his might against a drag that obviously wasn't tight enough. Somehow he managed to land his first fish of the day, a small largemouth:

I knew I had a problem on my hands now. How was I going to convince him we needed to move?
I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to work the flat a little more thoroughly.........maybe he was on to something.
20 minutes later we both knew he wasn't, so we moved down river a few hundred more yards. We stopped at the first location that offered him a chance to cover some water that held a few eddies and some structure. Once again, I went knee deep into the unknown.
I gave the area the best attempt I could, but just couldn't get my mindset past the thoughts of needing to find some type of deep hole or larger eddy then we were finding. To say my confidence was low was an understatement. I had myself convinced the area wasn't going to hold what I was looking for and it could be seen in my lack of attentiveness. Wading out of the water, and walking back to were I had left ZZ, I was presented with this picture:

Fully expecting to walk over and see both treble hooks embeded in either his gloves or jacket.............or both, I was quite surprised when he stood up, admired another largemouth and gently release it.
He heard me break a twig walking over to him, turned around, smiled, and said, "Hey Daddy, I just caught another one."
This wouldn't have had such an impact on me had I actually been getting any kind of action. The fact that I had yet to even have a tap, and he was nonchalantly voicing that he had caught "another one" kinda rubbed me the wrong way.
I love the child dearly, but thoughts of just giving him a shove into the water were beginning to materialize in my head.
We fished for a few more minutes then decided the wind was just too wicked to deal with anymore. The long walk back to the truck was what memories are made of. His excitement was showing in his never ending conversation, and I was relishing every word, knowing he may very well never forget this time we were spending together.
On our way home, I drove over to the power plant to explain the processes that made this warmwater fishing possible then we drove downstream for a few miles just to see what other anglers were doing. We reached the end of a dirt road that I had used on my first trip this year and was surprised to see no other vehicles there.
"Let's take just a few minutes to check this one spot down here before we go home" I offered to ZZ. He was fine with the idea - for a few minutes.
I had just enough time to get a few casts into an eddy that had much deeper water then where we came from to pull my second panfish from this section of the river - a short pumpkinseed:


I say short, because the thickness of this fish seemed inflated for it's length. This single fish brought hope to my beliefs that there is an untapped bluegill fishery here. Another cast along the wood pile that had collected in this eddy produced a solid take, but no hook-up. My white twister tail was torn off just behind the hook.
ZZ was losing interest quickly.
I started wondering about larger pumpkinseeds.
ZZ started voicing his lack of interest.
I looked at the water and started wondering about rockbass, smallmouth, and walleye.
ZZ was at my side saying he was ready to go.
I looked at the openings between the floating logs and thought............I'll vertical jig them next time.....................

Sunday afternoon found ZZ telling anyone that would listen about his fishing trip.
I was just as proud of him taking 3rd. place out of 48 cars at his Pinewood Derby.

[Kiana Fitzpatrick]

Nice story...love the part where you want to push him in the water...sounds like my hubby when I'm catching and he's NOT...LOL...thanks for sharing