Postcard: Sept 23, 2004
So long (summer) and thanks for all the fish
After summer camp ended, and after the boredom, and after the summer colds, and after the summer cold that hit me way harder than it hit my kids, we decided to go fishing. Interest had been brewing and I figured, How hard can this be? I’ll take my kids fishing.
At this point, a month later, I am charmed by such naive optimism. Such fanciful notions! I would just drive my children to a lake (which lake?) and watch them fish (which means what exactly?) while i knit (omg!).
Of course I can take my kids fishing, I just need to find and fix the 40-year-old gear that we have in the basement, and that means I need to learn how to swap out the broken reel for a functioning one, and understand fishing regulations and sift through some old tackle boxes to figure out what is in that jumble. I also needed to find places to fish, did you know there’s an app for that? Of course there is.
We started with what we found in the basement, and it did us pretty well. But then we reeled in the first fish and then we wondered, “How do you tell fish apart? It just looks like a fish.” And now we have 5 books on fish and fishing from the library. And have watched hours of fishing videos on Youtube.
And the rest of the time has been spent untangling the all the lines. To quote my son “The knots we tie have nothing on the one’s made by Mother Nature.” Absolutely…except… wait, mother nature didn’t…
The good news is I get to untangle fishing lines in beautiful creek-side settings on some beautiful fall mornings. Occasionally I cast a line into the water, too, and I did catch a nice looking yellow perch that one time.
And the more we learn, the more questions we have. The rabbit hole we have wandered down is so deep. We have now been fishing 20 times in the last month, we have fished in three lakes, 2 reservoirs, two creeks and one river. I can sort of identify 5 fish, but don’t quiz me. And I’m not even going to explain the rowboat, but there is a rowboat involved in this operation.
This adventure has brought us to some beautiful places, and taught us to see where we live in a whole new way. Its been an unexpected interlude, and makes for an excellent homeschool science curriculum. For better or worse, we are entering some of the best fishing months for our area, and that’s going to require more long underwear, wool socks and hot tea. Wish me luck!