Fishing Forum

Friday Capt. Larry Hooper and I took the "Boy Scouts of America" on a fishing adventure.

Every year, Capt. Hoop gets them down to Venice and this year he made me part of the deal. Thanks Larry, I had a blast!

I really got this thing about kids fishing, I mean that's what a kid is supposed to do. After all, when I was a kid and my Dad couldn't find me, all he had to do was look in the nearest draining ditch. If there was a pond, forget about it, and if I didn't have a fishing pole, I was swimming or wading in it.

So, I get 2 of the boys, I think a dad and the troop leader? Well Capt. Hoop suggests the area, and I got excited and told Hoop, I know a killer spot in that area. So I take the lead. I stopped the boat, baited everyone up and all that and for about 3 minutes nothing was happening, then a nice baby bull red came up and smoked the troop leaders cork. I jumped to the bow, and threw right where the strike was, popped twice and BAMM! So I start yelling for one of the kids to come grab my rod and fight this fish.

He fights that baby bull in, and once I net him, everything calms down again, so while everyone's fishing, I throw a handful of chum out, next thing you know these guys are doubling and tripling up. I keep stressing to them, "Don't tangle your lines, don't get snagged" and all the stuff I do when things are just going crazy. I keep telling them, they cannot stop fishing or the fish will simply swim off.

Capt. Hoop is close by and after about 45 minutes he yells at me to see how many we have, I told him 20 redfish, and 5 of the 20 were baby bulls, solid limit. So I move my boat out of the way so Larry can get his boat in. But before I could move, I had to literally tell my crew, to "Put the rods down"!, because everytime they threw out, they caught another one.

On my boat, we left the dock at 7:15am and by 8:30am we had 127 lbs. of fish.

That night the kids all went back to Capt. Hoop's to camp out and tell stories.

Enjoy the pics;










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Awesome! Way to get them on the fish. When I was a scout leader I took the scouts out every year several times and they earned the fishing merit badge. Nothing like when they are biting fast and furious.
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