I took my 4 year old son fishing on a trout lake in the high country one day. It was stocked with rainbows and 20" fish are caught on ocassion but a 12" is average. I used two poles, one with a bobber and worm about 3 feet deep and with the other I was casting different baits for pike. No strikes, so I put on a worm and threw it out into about 15 feet of water on the bottom. And we waited.

By now my son was bored- usually there is some action to keep his attention-and he was wandering around the rocks lining the shore. Well, he saw a crawdad and was trying to catch it, so I got a stick about 2 feet long, put on 3 feet of line and a small hook and bit of worm and soon enough he was excitedly catching crawdads and throwing them in the bucket.

I hadn't had a bite yet when my son says a fish tried to eat his bait. Now we all know 4 year old boys have got an active imagination and I didn't pay much mind to his excited babbling about a fish, but just put some more worm on his hook and he went back over and put his bait in some water 6 FEET away from the edge of the lake among the rocks where the water had worked its way. And he brings up a 7" Bluegill! I had been fishing that lake for years and didn't even know there were gills in there- I guess all the pike kept em in the rocks (Pike up to 42"!).

Well, he caught another gill and then D@%^ if he didn't get a 12" rainbow to top it off!! Meanwhile I hadn't got a bite!

When we left he had a couple dozen crawdads, a trout and two gills with a 2 foot stick while I had NOTHING! Except a bunch of laughs and a good story to tell!