With an increasingly busy schedule these days, I am usually anxious to get straight to fishing and often opt just grab some live bait at the local shop and head directly to our favorite spot rather than taking time to catch bait on our own. However, I always enjoyed throwing a cast net with my father when I was growing up and have continued to do so throughout my lifetime. Many of my friends and fishing buddies never enjoyed throwing a net on our trips, but I always thought that they were missing out because it was a great part of the complete fishing experience. There is something that is especially satisfying about stalking a bunch of mud minows, finger mullet or baby croakers in a shallow inlet with your cast net and later converting them into big speckled trout or throwing blindly in a cove near the mouth of the Mississippi River for some big mullet to turn into 100 lb yellowfin.
My kids started throwing a net at an early age and have always enjoyed helping me retrieve the haul from each throw and getting them to the live well promptly, but they always needed my help to get the net ready to throw it themselves. That all changed for my 9 year old son this week when something just clicked during our family reunion at the beach. He just got it and started throwing a 6 foot net like an old pro. He would spend hours on the beach each day throwing his net, catching baitfish and starting all over.
One evening I sat down own the beach with him for several hours helping him spot bait and clean out his net after each throw. At the end of the evening, we took a walk down the beach and he commented that "this has been a great day. Now we can throw two nets when we go so that I can help catch bait and we can start fishing sooner." I loved hearing that! Each generation seems to get the fever worse than the one before it, and its great to see how much he appreciates every aspect of being on and around the water.
Don't forget to include your kids in every aspects of your trips and make sure that they enjoy the complete fishing experience.
I missed this post but I just read it because a spammer posted BS in this thread. Very cool story. Now I want a cast net. When I was a kid I used to spend hours on the beach catching fish using a mosquito net - I probably still have my last one at my grandmother's apartment on the beach. I enjoyed catching fish and putting them in buckets, then release at the end of the day or bring them to the apartment as pets for a few days. That didn't work out well as you can imagine. I got a bottle of water once or twice per day from the beach to replace (didn't have aerators), but a lot of fish went belly up
Also spent a lot of time catching bait on the beach with my uncle. We used a pump made with PVC tubes to catch a crustacean, or we collected small white shells. Good times.
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