Tidelines – July 14, 2011
As most mothers know, trying to entertain two little boys for an entire day without any kind of game plan can lead to bored kids, misbehaving kids, or some sort of undesirable outcome. So when my wife went out of town for 5 days on a “girls trip” and left me to fend for myself with Owen (age 5) and James (age 4), I knew I needed to schedule some big adventures for them (plus I wanted to be the Hero Dad).
Challenges often create opportunities, and this challenge of entertaining my two boys for the better part of a week led to the opportunity to do a Waterman’s Way trip with Capt. Jeff Wolfe of Seahawk Inshore Fishing Charters out of the Wilmington area. And thus, this week’s Guide Time feature article was born.
As you would suspect, I’ve been trying to bring my boys up to have a love of fishing and the water. Getting them loving the water has been easy—we travel by boat to an island, and they play in the sand, explore the little feeder creeks, and swim in the water.
Nurturing their interest in fishing has been a harder battle. They love catching bait, playing with bait, and releasing bait. Casting and retrieving, without the instant gratification of hooking a fish, doesn’t quite hold them yet.
Capt. Jeff Wolfe takes a lot of families with kids out on the water, and he has a winning recipe for entertaining moms, dads, and children who may not have the patience that traditional fishing trips often require. He constantly introduces the party to new activities (in addition to fishing, he also gets them clamming, crabbing, pulling a seine net, and searching for sand dollars), and he also makes sure that everyone—young and old—is able to be as interactive as they wish to be.
In planning our Waterman’s Way Guide Time trip, I had warned Jeff and Max that I wasn’t sure which version of my kids would be showing up the morning of our trip. They may get the fun-loving, easy-going, ready-for-anything kids. However, James and Owen are only 4 and 5, and sometimes they wake up grumpy or pouty and are resistant to just about anything put in front of them.
On the Sunday morning of our trip, Owen and James fell somewhere in the middle of easy-going and uncooperative. They were excited to see crabs and clams and fish and sand dollars, but they were also a little anxious for their mom’s return (Sunday was day 5 of her trip).
Their overall mood, though, steadily turned to smiles and laughter and question after question (after question…), as Jeff, who has raised a son of his own, played his role of both boat captain and kid entertainer perfectly.
The kids first enjoyed the short boat ride to our first stop, egging Jeff to go faster and to try and hit more boat wakes. Then they welcomed the praise that followed when they would successfully cast out a two-hook chicken rig all by themselves. They were a little slow on keeping tension on the line to feel the bites of croakers and pinfish, but once they were instructed to keep reeling in slowly, they began bringing in fish after fish. James probably took the title of most fish caught (they’re brothers and hence always competitive), but Owen was able to counter with hooking the morning’s only double.
You can read all about our Waterman’s Way adventure with Jeff Wolfe starting on page 30. My wife Leslie came home to two happy and tired boys with lots of stories to tell, and the boys were more than proud to present her with several sand dollars (which Max had tried to convince them could be traded in to her for real dollars), as well as a welcome home dinner of steamed clams and blue crabs.
From dinner to bedtime, Owen and James kept repeating our tag phrase from the trip, “It’s the Waterman’s Way.” And then the next afternoon when Leslie came up on James peeing in the bushes and asked him why he wasn’t using the bathroom, James (who has always been comfortable peeing off the boat) was quick with a big smile to reply once again, “It’s the Waterman’s Way.”
