Honestly one of the best days of fishing I've ever had. Ben and I left home at 7am, got to Mike's at about :10 after, and had lines in the water by 7:15. Ben abandoned his homemade 5" clay plug after one cast--I think he just wanted to say he'd fished his own creation.
We got reset on good old hook-splitshot-bobber-and-a-worm, and Ben's first strike was an explosive one. The bobber disappeared, and the line snapped within a few seconds. Particularly impressive because I don't think his zebco 404 has anything less than 8# test on it. Perhaps this was a gargantuan grass carp, maybe the line was old, coulda been a big trout, and prolly ol' Ben had the rod tip pointed at the fish. It's not easy when you're 4'1".
We got retied up [and we should say here that 1st mate Dad did all the tying and Ben did all the fishing for most of this time] and soon enough Ben had another of Mike's signature monster hybrid sunfish:
I missed the picture of this last time, just fish in hand and head of boy, so I was glad to catch this one. I threw out a grasshopper crankbait a couple times, and had 1-2 decent topwater strikes, but on the whole, pretty slow action. Buster rolled up a hand-sized red-ear sunfish that looked like the washout of the 3rd or 4th generation of the hybrids Mike originally stocked, almost like a crappie.
By 8:00 the sun was up far enough to be bugging me as we faced southeast, so we took to the southeast side of the pond [it's probably less than an acre, this pond, spring fed and dammed to make a ~5-8ft deep catchment] and I cast Ben out while I goofed around trying to figure out what to throw next. He nabbed another red-ear crappie-patterned sunfish, and I eventually got on a Haddon Torpedo, frog pattern with a propeller that never got to do much work.
I zinged this thing about 80 yards across the pond with my new microspinning combo [20.95 at Walmart], and maybe I was providing guide service on how much slack to take up, but I missed a topwater strike--never even tried to set the hook. So I plopped it down in the same spot, and got a massive hit. After dragging what I was sure was a bass halfway across the pond, I pulled up a 20" 2+lb rainbow trout. Ben took the picture:
That worked well enough that I thought we ought to try it again, even though it was pushing 9 and we needed to get home for Yom Kippur [I was atoning for something, I'm sure, by taking my Jewish son fishing]. I put the Haddon back down on the far side of the pond, just off the weedline, and handed Buster the pole. He took up the slack, got a nice strike, set the hook, and after a long, drawn out fight with two aerial explosions, he had a decent sized largemouth bass:
This apparently equaled the earlier outing for bluefish, because he was quite impressed with his catch.
So, Mike put us into the fish, I had some success with artificials, and I had the great reward of watching Ben haul in a keeper sized largemouth. 3 sunfish, 1 largemouth bass, 1 rainbow trout.
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