Tidelines – October 24, 2013
My two oldest boys—Owen (age 8) and James (age 6)—and I recently made a great fishing memory together, and I have NewBridge Bank to thank for it.
Their dad may own and run Fisherman’s Post, but that doesn’t mean Owen and James were automatically born with the fishing gene. I think the fishing DNA will ultimately show itself, but so far that DNA has been outshined by video games.
Like many young kids (not all, but many), Owen and James get bored with fishing. Catching they are interested in, but fishing itself hasn’t quite grabbed them. Waiting for a bite equals boredom, and their answer to boredom on the boat is to ask if they can play games on my iPhone.
I do what parents do, though. I keep exposing them to fishing without forcing them on fishing, and we recently had a break through—the NewBridge Bank Spanish Mackerel Open.
Success wasn’t due to the target species, as they could really care less about a spanish mackerel. They think all fish are cool to look at and touch, but they have no opinion yet about what kind of fishing they want to do. For the most part, a fish is still just a fish to them.
Success also didn’t come from making the event an easy one to participate in (we didn’t clear Masonboro Inlet until about 9:00 am, and stayed all morning within a couple miles of the rock jetties before weighing in around lunch time).
Even my formula of stocking the boat with donuts and juice boxes wasn’t the key to our fishing memory. Yes, we ate all the donuts and drank multiple juice boxes, but the real catalyst came in the motivation of “winning” a medal.
For the NewBridge Bank Spanish Mackerel Open, every kid that weighs in a spanish mackerel is awarded a medal, and it was the desire to earn a medal that had my kids more engaged in fishing then they had ever been before.
A spanish may still be a spanish, but a spanish that represents winning a medal suddenly became a wonderful inspiration. Now instead of asking for the phone, they were watching for working birds and telling me where to troll to next. They weren’t sitting in the front of the boat wondering when we were going back home, rather they were standing by the leaning post keeping an eye on both rod tips to be the first to notice that a planer had tripped.
And when we hooked a fish, the boys went into systematic action: keep the rod in the rod holder and reel in at a steady pace, when the planer gets to the rod tip grab the rod out of the holder with two hands and hand to Daddy, Daddy tips the rod so that they can grab the leader, and then they hand line the fish to the back of the boat before swinging it over the gunnels in one smooth motion.
“Fish on the deck.”
That morning we caught spanish, blues, lizard fish, and even an undersized flounder on our Clarkspoons, and each fish was a celebration. If the bite slowed down, then the boys intuitively suggested I go back to the spot where we had last caught a fish. And if we suddenly started hooking fish, then they instructed me to keep trolling in circles until the bite stopped.
Apparently the fishing DNA had always been inside them, and it came out strong on that Saturday morning.
Owen and James each weighed in a fish at Seapath Marina, and then they signed their own weight slip, good practice for the numerous fishing tournaments we will (hopefully) fish together in the future.
My boys are young, so I have a long ways to go before I can declare that fishing has beaten video games, but I know that fishing won on that overcast morning, with chocolate (James) and glazed (Owen) donuts in our bellies while we watched bent planer rods and waited for a magical spanish mackerel.
