Last Sunday (July 11) we went fishing with, now wait, can it be, all five of the little boys who were staying here. That’s Gena’s three kids and David & Rachel’s two, Millie’s five grandsons, my grandnephews. Arlene is good about putting worms on hooks but refuses to touch the fish if any are caught, so that falls to me.
We set off mid-morning for our association’s boat dock. The deal with our property is that we’re part of an association that owns two lakefront lots and maintains the private road the house is on. People who live on the lake side of the road own their own lakefront, and people who live on the opposite side of the street, the back lots, like us, are entitled to use the two communally owned lots. One of those is a swimming beach, with buoys to keep boats out and a float to swim out to. It’s a five minute walk from our house. The other is half as wide, has a dock but no beach, and is almost directly across the road from the end of our driveway. That’s what we set off for, a parade of Arlene and me, five small boys, and small boys’ mothers. We got four fishing rods rigged up with bobbers (go away, wiggly underline, that is so a word), hooks, and worms, but there was not the least bit of evidence of fish activity. After ten minutes or so of nothing happening, we decided on a change of venue. We figured out how to set up car seats and headed off to plan B, Parker Pond, two miles away, close to downtown Casco. I cast everyone’s worms out into the pond. Pretty soon Mason, the oldest of the kids, started reeling in a fish! It ran under a log to a point where he couldn’t pull it in any farther. I took the rod and directed the fish to open water, from which we (and by now I forget if it was me, or if Mason finished the reeling in) got it to shore. I’m waiting for Rachel to send me the pictures she took of Mason and the fish, but it was a decent-sized largemouth bass, not as big as the one Arlene got a couple of weeks ago, but at least close to legal size. Not clearly legal size, though, and we didn’t want to keep it anyway. I unhooked it with little difficulty and let it go. Mason got two more fish, small (I mean more like five inches long than ten) bass that also were easy to release, but too small to be worthy of pictures. We must have prepared the kids enough with “sometimes you catch some, a lot of the time you don’t” that there was no real grumbling from the other kids. We’re still looking for a place that you can catch lots of sunfish, or perch, or even horned pout.