I fished fresh water from a young age. My folks gave me a black and white Zebco 202 for my birthday one year....I was maybe 8? My Dad worked at a private swimming pond on the Weston/Lincoln line for 25 summers I was growing up so I spent alot of time there with him fishing for bass, pickeral perch and blue gills while he worked. Great summers!
After I separated from my first wife I had zero money......so with what little I did have I would take my 2 young sons, get a bucket of shiners and go fishing in the local ponds! Then with my last couple dollars I would buy them each a Happy Meal afterwards. We made the very best of a bad situation.
One day my sons and I spent an afternoon at Nantasket Beach in Hull. As they jumped around in the surf they saw a bunch of fish swimming around them......they were schoolie stripers chasing peanuts. The boys asked if we could try fishing for them some day? I had never fished stripers before......fished for tommy cod and flounder with my Zebco as a boy but that was all my saltwater experience. So per my boys request we took a couple of my Dad's very dated and dusty fishing rod and reel combos from the basement and headed to the local bait and tackle shop where we bumped into a buddy of mine who was headed to Hull Gut to soak some bait for stripers.....so he invited us along. My boys each caught their first ever striper that day. That was a great day for this Dad with his 2 boys. So beautiful were the stripers to me I was bitten by the bug! So I started to educate myself on striper fishing and started to go quite a bit. Long story short that was 1 beach buggy, 1 kayak, 1 wet suit, 1 canal bike, 8 pairs of waders, 3 years as MSBA Vice President, untold thousands of dollars in fishing and plug building equipment, 17,000+ posts on S-B and over 10 years ago.......I was not bitten by the bug I was devoured by it!!!
I am a richer man for all of it.......there is nothing I would rather do!
My kids made fishing great for me! They were great times with them when they were young and I was broke!