With ice or straight up?

A friend called the other day while driving from Texas to Colorado. He was on his way to pick up his son and then they were going ice fishing! Ice fishing! I know a lot of people like to ice fish, especially when it's winter and the only way to satisfy that craving for fishing to to cut a hole in the ice, but those 2 words don't go well together for me. I like to fish without ice. See, I like to wet wade and having ice on the water is just too much for me to handle. I like it when the water is at least 56 degrees.



Anyway, Eric wanted to know what we were up to since we sort of dropped off the blog world and weren't reporting in. I thought I'd do a quick update on a recent fishing excursion. Lucky for us, here in Arizona during the winter the ice is rare.

Our nephews came to visit last month and the 6 year old was like a typical eager little boy wanting to fish. We took them to the local urban lake where Fish & Game had just finished stocking catfish and had started stocking trout.

When the nephews are older and we're on a stream we plan to introduce 'em to fly fishing, but for now we had to "stick" with the garden hackle variety of store-bought worms. On the first day of the urban lake fishing they caught a nice little bass and let it go. The next day they caught a crappie and a good size trout (for an urban lake). This time the fish swallowed the worm-fly and a neighbor fisherperson wanted them for dinner so we gave them up. However, we were able to share with our young nephews that we put the fish back to live another day whenever possible.

The older boy was very interested in the fishing adventure, but the 3 year old was easily distracted by the other kids playing in the playground and wanted to feed the ducks more than he wanted to wait for a fish to bite. Sort of like me when the osprey flies overhead or the deer wander down to the river bank, it's easy to be distracted.

Although Rick cast the line out most of the time so the worm had a good chance of finding a fish, he let Josh practice casting and soon realized that he was pretty darn good. He'll be able to cast a fly rod some day soon.

We were just as thrilled with our days of fishing as our nephews were. We look forward to the future when we can share fly fishing in Montana with them.