Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Fishin' 2010

We spent the day at our farm today and had an absolute blast. Cooked out, hiked, did a little brush trimming on some very rough trails, played with the kids, and FISHED! Second day this week we've gotten to do this and just can't believe how blessed we were to find this land. Just took a few pictures, but some good ones.

The first one is my 4 year old, AJ, with the first fish he has ever caught totally by himself. He learned to cast a full sized spincaster today and was just reeling in on his last cast when an 8-9 inch LMB hit his artificial grub! He was ecstatic, understandably, and so were we! He was hamming it up a bit in this pic - probably none of you have had a little boy do that before!

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Here's one of him and his sisters, who both combined to catch 4 LMB and 5 BG today, all fairly small. We didn't shoot pics of them today as I only had my camera phone and wasn't ready for good quality pics, but these were pretty special opportunities, so the phone had to do.

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This final pic is of what is by far the biggest fish we've caught since buying the farm last August. I was fishing a Yozuri Pop-R and right at a pause in my retrieve, this fish hit it. After two nice jumps entirely out of the water and a roughly 60 second fight, she was on the shore!

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What was cool is that I was fishing an ultralight Ugly Stick and had set my drag fairly loose since most of our fish are not terribly big. This one really worked that setup nicely and made it a lot of fun, especially because it was a pretty long cast and she hit just a few seconds into my retrieve.

I am calling it a she because of the size and the fact that her belly was really quite soft, unlike the generally firm belly on the handful of big fish I've caught other places. It was really quite "mushy" and I suspected that maybe it was a gravid female who appeared to have a nice batch of eggs in her. I may be totally wrong, but either way, this was a really nice surprise to catch.

My biggest regret is that my 7 year old daughter, Jess, the little blond haired one in the pic above, walked off and I found her inside our building crying. She had the previous record fish out of the pond that we have referred to as "King Bass" since last fall. King Bass was probably a 14 inch, pound to pound and a quarter fish that she caught and landed all by herself. It honestly broke my heart when we were talking and she said that she was sad because this one was bigger (probably 15 inches or so and I'm guessing 1.5 - 2 pounds, but I didn't have anything to measure with). We had a good talk and I explained that she'll catch this one one day and probably even a bigger one. She is so into fishing and I love to see this sort of competitiveness in her. She works hard at doing everything just right, and is even the only one of my kids who will kiss every fish she catches for good luck! Anyway, that was only downer of what was otherwise a great day of family fun and, being 7, she's rebounded pretty well already!

Sorry for the length of this post, but I know you all value family time as much as I do and will understand and tolerate a dad's ramblings!