Simple Father-Son Time Steven M. Platek, PhD Spencer J. Platek
We love to fish. Two summers ago, we decided to keep track of the number of fish we caught in an Excel spreadsheet. Every morning we were the first ones in the neighborhood to wake up and before playing ball, riding bikes, etc., we would hit our local neighborhood lake that we refer to as the “hood pond.” That summer we fished almost every day; we would fish a few hours in the morning and a few hours before sunset.
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We ended up logging over 1,000 fish. To be exact we caught 1,084 fish out of that lake over the course of the summer. Most were variants of panfish: bluegill, shellcrackers, pumpkinseeds, redbreasts, but some were brown bullhead catfish, and others were bass.
I think it was that summer that we developed a love of fishing together. We love to spend time as father and son on water catching fish, or sometimes other critters like crawfish and salamanders. It was at the end of that summer that I decided that we were going to start taking an annual father-son trip that involved the outdoors, namely fishing. We even have a scratch-off map to track our adventures. Our first trip was to the coast of Georgia, Tybee Island. We rented a quaint little cabin right on the bay that allowed us to crab right in our weekend backyard. We also took a “kids’ charter boat" fishing in the sea. I can’t recommend this enough! We caught croakers, whitefish, sand sharks, black tipped sharks, skates and rays. Spencer even got to drive the boat back to dock. Our second trip was also local. We went camping just north of Helen, Georgia. The campground had a dozen or so primitive campsites and a decent sized creek that split the north side of the campground from the south. This was our first-time camping, but what we lacked in camp prep was made up for by time spent in that creek. (Hesitant to reveal creek name, because loose lips can destroy small creeks.) We had just started to learn how to fly fish and we were slanging a small Chinese fixed line rod that was bought for about $8 and some change off Amazon. We caught probably 50 fish
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