Another beautiful day on Cascade Lake. The park was crowded with tourists but only another 3 fishing boats and us. Started at 10:00am and stopped at 3pm. Temp was about 72 degrees and interestingly the water cooled since last time. With quite a bit of rain the lake temp was down to 67.8. Winds very light until time to trailer the boat. Then a mean cross wind which made for about five attempts. Needed an aft spring line to assist. But a nice young man showed up and waded into the water to grab the bow and hold it while we got strapped on.
In returned we helped him off load his big canoe from the roof of his truck.

Some friends had been taking their grandchildren fishing off the shores and fishing dock and had not caught anything. They asked if we could show them how to catch fish here and we said, "Better yet let's go out in our boat."

K. and I launched the boat at 10am and had rigged for panfish and small LMB knowing we'd have better action for the kids that way. We fished our way down to the rendezvous spot and landed 3 pumpkinseed and 3 LMB along the way.

We met our guests: 2 children, father and his son. At 10:30 we took the father and the four year old daughter in our boat. Both children had pink ice fishing spinning rods! Gramps anticipated the four year's attention span would be short so suggested we just take her out for about ten minutes. When K. or I. would get a fish on our pan fish rigs or wedding rings with worms we'd hand her the pole. She landed eight fish! After a half and hour we returned to land with smiles and success stories and said goodbye..

Next, Gramps and the six year old got in the boat. We were told the six year old would be very cooperative and up for anything. So off we went. We fished some of the same shoreline to get her first fish ever, a bass. We lost quite a few handing our rods over to her with slack getting on the line, but it was still exciting. We decided to troll across the lake to the lagoon. I switched to a small crankbait and got another LMB bass and handed off the rod. It was fun showing the child about different lures.

We fished outside the lagoon and targeted small fish to keep the action going for the little one.
Here she picked up a sculpin. Cracked us up when she said it looked like a slug! Guess, I'd never thought of that before. The real treat was when she would let out line on her spinning rod and catch a fish on her own rod.

My thrill was seeing a sweet six year old girl not sqeemish to touch a fish and better yet, when she asked to hold the worm and bait her own rig. And to top it off we were not using whole worms but breaking them in half or thirds and she did it without hesitation! My kind of girl!

After two hours we returned to dock with the six year old. She landed 11 fish, six of which she caught on her own on her $12.99 pole!

K. and I fished one more hour after off-loading our guests. Quantity....it was actually a slow day.
31 fish caught and released. Quality....priceless.

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