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My grandson, who is 5, is teaching me how to fish. I mean it. Brady is a natural fisherman.
Brady and I don’t get to fish together as often as we would like because he lives in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and I am an Appalachian Mountain hillrat.
But, when we get together, we fish.
A couple weeks ago, we journeyed over to New Creek Dam 14 where I used to take his father and his uncles when they were his same old.
Every time I take Brady fishing I learn something about the activity. One time I learned that it is important to wash the worms before using them as bait. Another time I learned that it can be more fun to simply play with worms than to sit along the shoreline not catching fish.
“Worms are awesome, Pappy,” Brady said, each hand holding as many fat, squirming nightcrawlers as possible.
It is also important, I discovered, to simply drop your fishing rod so that you can go pick up and play with a daddy-longlegs. Brady has never met a bug that he won’t pick up and examine. Of course, bugs have a way of teaching you which ones you can handle and which ones you can’t. He will learn more quickly that way than by hearing his grandfather preach at him.
Speaking of preaching, I learned to let Brady fish his own way. I gave him ample instruction about how to set the hook once he saw the bobber dive under the surface. He preferred, though, to let the bobber move away for some time and then simply start cranking the reel on his red and blue Spiderman fishing rod.
It worked so I finally realized it was time for me to shut up.
I learned from Brady that it is important to teach bluegills how to fly.
It’s actually relatively easy, as long as the bluegills are not too large.
You watch the bobber move. You start cranking. When the bluegill approaches the shore you haul back on your fishing gizmo so hard that the panfish trades water for air, soaring over a 5-year-old’s head and into the puckersticks.
Among the other fishing tricks I have learned from Brady is that there are too many rocks along the shoreline and not enough in the lake itself.
The way to correct this geological deficiency is to grab the dry rocks and make them wet by tossing them into the lake where they sink to the bottom. Brady informed me that the larger the rock the bigger the splash as it enters the pond.
Perhaps Brady is thinking that by adding rocks to the bottom it will force the fish to swim closer to the surface where his bobber and worm will be more easily seen.
The one thing Brady didn’t do is ask me if there are any sharks in New Creek Dam, though his father posed that question a number of years back.
I figure our granddaughter, Chelsea, will also be able to teach me some things about fishing. She will be 3 come next April so I figure that would be a good time to get some sort of little princess-style, pink-colored fishing rod and take her to the pond. Something that matches her Cinderella shoes that light up as she walks would probably be appropriate.
Grammie, though, said the little diva doesn’t like to get her hands dirty or water on her clothes so it might not work out. I know she didn’t want anything to do with the worms that her brother thought were awesome.
Anyway, Grammie was telling some friends the other day how natural a shopper Chelsea is because of the way she checks out items in stores when she is taken there by Grammie and Jaime, her mom.
“She’s had some good teachers,” I said. “I should have known it was coming when her first three words were ‘mama, Kohl’s and ka-ching.’ ”
I guess grammies and moms dote on the way a young lady takes to aisles and cash registers the same way pappies and dads relish the way a lad masters a spincast reel.
Contact Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.
Michael A Sawyers - Outdoors
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