First Father/Son Fishing

After Joshua's successful fishing effort at the Lenexa event in June, I decided I needed to find a time for us to go fishing by ourselves.  We had time this morning, so today was designated as our first ever father/son fishing trip!  I bought him a fishing rod and a pre-loaded tackle box.  I also went to Walmart and bought a one-day fishing license for me (he doesn't need one) as well as some night-crawlers.  I chose Kill Creek Lake as our locale, based on recommendations from others.  We didn't exactly leave at the crack of dawn like fisherman tend to do, because I'm not a crack-of-dawn kind of guy.  So here we are, as two fisherman about to embark on our adventure.

There's a dock that juts out into the lake, so we started there.  We were only going to fish with his pole so I could focus on helping him.  It wasn't a very chilly morning, but the breeze from over the lake was quite cold, so we added some extra layers.  As you can see, Joshua was very pumped about the whole thing.  In an effort to set his expectations, I had to warn him that sometimes you have to sit for a long period of time while you wait for the fish to bite.  But we did get a couple bites pretty early on, though nothing that got hooked.  The jerks did manage to take some of my worms.  Perhaps I need to improve my technique.  I then decided to move to a narrow grassy area
that was essentially a bridge, as I'd hoped the narrowing of the waterway would mean more fish would be going through it.

And I was right!  Almost immediately we had some activity, and very quickly Joshua hooked a fish.  You can see it on the end of the line near the water.  He was elated.

It was a redear sunfish, so named because of the red spot by its ear.  We are only doing catch-and-release today, so we put him on a stringer (the one we won by winning the fishing derby; and in fact most of the equipment used was from that) and fished a little more, though we were almost out of time, so that was the only fish we caught.  But it was a total success, because he had a ton of fun, and he caught a fish, and it was really special to me to be able to have that time with just him for our first father/son fishing trip.