Fishing with my kids, in my PDRacer
I live in the desert, so there aren't a lot of fish here, and the typical big bass is heavily hunted, so I suspect that they get caught and removed often. We thought about going after Bluegill or Texas Cichlid, my daughter caught a 10" one once which would be worthy of recognition. Then it struck me that back at the last cardboard boat race, we saw what looked like a 3 foot long carp at Tempe Town Lake. So we headed down there to try and catch one.
Went in the evening, we found a nice spot near a boat tie up where my wife sat, we chummed the water with bits of the dough ball & corn. The breeze picked up a bit so we sailed around while waiting for the chum to attract the carp.
Originally we were going to anchor underneath one of the bridges, but since my wife was here, we tied up near where she sat. Ate the dinner we brought, and it was time to try and catch some carp.
My younger daughter is a fidgeter, couldn't hold still for 10 seconds if she had to. From the carp angling website, the tip is to just leave it on the bottom and don't mess with it. So she would drop the line in the water, do a few cranks, yank on it and say that she thinks the fish were looking at her bait, and she wanted to check it. Also with the big weight on the end of the line, if she would gently tug at it, it would feel like something was nibbling on it so she had about a dozen false alarms.
Then on the umpteenth time she was telling me she had another bite, her pink barbie rod went ZZZZZTTTT ZZZTTTTT (the clicking sound drag pulling out). She had a carp on and it was running !!
She held on for dear life and cranked when she could. This is the carp she landed, I forgot my measure tape, so we used her arm as a reference. Measured the arm when we got home, and this fish came in at 15".
My older daugher was kinda bummed and thinking that she might never catch anything. We chummed the water some more, and a few minutes later she said "Uhhh... I think I have one". She did a crank and the drag started ticking off "yep, I have one" She has a Scooby rod and that thing bent WAY over as she fought it. This one ended up being 19" long.
