Daughter's first fish

One of the beauties of the combination of pastoring and homeschooling is that there is a measure of flexibility to a schedule. In theory, Monday is my day off. But my wife was babysitting, so I spent a goodly portion of late Monday working ahead on my S.S. lesson, then took some time yesterday afternoon, with my wife not working, to go fishing with my wife and daughter.

I don't know if I mentioned or not, but we'd come across this lovely little path beside the Lower NE Cape Fear River (some men in my church showed it to me) in the Holly Shelter game lands. There's a cypress along the path that is hollow on the inside, and so big a large grown man could stand inside it without even coming close to bumping his head.

There's also loads of birds, frogs, and whatnot along the way; there's a low swamp on the other side of the path from the river. It's a great place for a nature hike.

Well, we went out there with some worms, with the intention of just hanging out for a couple of hours. The river has all manner of fish in it, from two-inch bluegill to forty-pound catfish, and some really strange fish I'd never seen before moving down here.

We tossed my daughter's line in the water for her, gave her the pole, and next thing you know, there went the bobber. She managed to reel in the fish (one of those small bluegill), and she had caught her very first fish on her own. (In the past, we've let her pull in ones that we hooked, or reeled in ones that she hooked, but she'd never both hooked and retrieved one.)

Now, if we can just teach her to bait her own hook and remove the fish herself...Oh, and develop more than 10 seconds worth of patience. It wasn't long before she had pulled all the worms out of the container and was playing with them instead of fishing, deciding that the longest one was her pet.