First Time Trawler: Fishing with TRC

A friend took TRC and me out trawling yesterday evening. (You know, for some reason, I’d always thought it was spelled “trolling.” Go figure.) For those of you who don’t know, this is a kind of fishing where you toodle around in a boat with your line trailing behind you, with bait that spins in the water, pretending to be a little fish. Bigger fish try to eat it, and voila! You’ve caught a fish.

We went out on North Pond (in case you were interested), and we caught about 50 fish (I lost count) in about an hour and a half. (My friend caught 109 in an hour when he went out last week with two other people.) If you don’t typically fish, let me just assure you that that’s an awful lot of fish. They’re white perch, and there’s no limit to the number you can keep of them. Still, we released about half. Most of them were in the 9-10 inches range.

TRC had a complete blast. For the first 45 minutes, he’d caught maybe 10 fish and I’d caught 2–he was feeling quite the fisherman. He was convinced the fish were coming to him because he was eating tic tacs. And I must say–once I ate a couple, I started catching plenty, too. So maybe there’s something to it. (Or maybe my breath was really that bad?) By the end of the day, TRC was casting the line out by himself, reeling in by himself–he was doing everything but taking the fish off the hook once he brought it in the boat. (White perch are pretty scaly, with sharp fins. I cut myself on one yesterday while I was cleaning them.)

We stopped and fished with worms for a while, too. You could just see entire schools of fish at the surface, gobbling up whatever they could see. Put your hook in, and five seconds later, you’d caught a fish. It was getting to the point that it felt like cheating, it was so easy. They’d even bite at bare hooks. (You have to wonder what some of those fish are thinking. They’ve got a bunch of buddies at first, and then their buddies start disappearing, one by one. And yet they keep doing the same stupid thing they were doing. Maybe fish have watched too many horror movies.)

The most fun was definitely watching TRC enjoy himself so much. He couldn’t stop talking about how much fun he was having, and how he wanted to do this all the time. I’m going to try and go get some poles for ourselves, and then take him out to some rivers and streams to fish. We don’t have a canoe or a boat, but we can fish from the shore just as easily. I’ll just have to make sure to wear some bug repellent. 🙂

Pictures were taken, but I don’t have any copies yet. I’ll post them to my Facebook page when I do.

Happy Friday, all!

2 thoughts on “First Time Trawler: Fishing with TRC”

  1. So I’d been spelling it right all along. When I was writing the post, I suddenly wasn’t sure, and I just did a cursory internet search to check–just skimmed. As a librarian, I really ought to know better . . .

    Thanks!

Leave a comment

×