"Kids" turning into sportsman...

[Mr. Sandman]

Most times when you go out fishing something goes wrong...weather, tides, moon, the boat, truck, the wife...or worse everything looks right and the fish are not there. Every now and then one of those nights comes along when everything falls into place. I had been fishing regularly in the poor conditions for a few weeks now and been doing pretty well. I knew some areas where fish were holding on a regular basis. I had been wanting to take my 2 boys out, but between school, the poor weather (read: rough seas) and other stuff going on we just could not seem to time it right to make a trip. Well, last Friday the wind stopped...I mean it was flat calm and when they came home from school one of them was free and we made it out to fish dusk. Watching him cast his live eel into the boulders along the shore I was thinking...his casting has really improved this year..he casts like a man now. My only instructions to him were to slow down his retrieve...let the eel swim...this ain't a popper. Minutes later, I heard..Whoa! then the sweet sound of the drag paying out to a steady run of a good fish. He got his biggest bass to date (30#) just after dark and had several others in the low 20's which he released. Up till this year, anything bigger then 28" was a "Keeper" and that meant "we keep it". I always had to juggle the scale a bit to make sure that "keeper fish" went back in the water. But this time he wanted to release the fish even before it got in the boat..Maybe it takes getting a "big one" to realize that we should release most fish, I don't know, but I sure had a great feeling watching a young boy release a 23#er and watching it swim away. I was much older before I got a fish over 30#. In the end, we came home with one bass each for the weigh-in, released 4 or 5 and a couple blues for the smoker. We saw a beautiful sunset over some beautiful islands, gazed at some great stars, caught a few nice fish and were all alone out there what seemed like a 1000 miles from home. That is what "quailty time" is all about in my book.