Today I fished with Carl and his Grand son Ben. Though Carl has fished with us before this was Bens first in a driftboat chasing steelhead.
Any time I hear there's going to be a teenager joining us I'm on guard, kids today are not the outdoors people that my generation was and still is. Video games, cell phones, and the Internet has taken the place of bicycles, BB guns, and fishing poles. In some ways I get it, the gadgets of today are far more than I ever dreamed of as a kid.
Ben is one of those rare kids of today who is a blend of both worlds, while he spends his mornings with grandpa in the boat catching Kokanee, he admits going home to his electronic world.
We started off the morning fishing coonshrimp under a float, an hour into the trip Carl's (aka grandpa) float went below the surface. ....FISH ON! Without a second thought he handed the rod to Ben, who was now attached to his first steelhead.
The fish did what steelhead typically do, it went CRAZY! Run after run, jump after jump, till it finally wore itself out, Ben was able to lead his fish boat side where we slid the net under it and pulled it in over the gunnel.
There was nothing fake in Bens smile when that fish was laying on the bottom of the boat and I can't blame him. We fished hard for the rest of the day, we had a couple other opportunities at fish that just didn't stick. I went home and posted Bens photo on Facebook, a short time later I accepted a friend request from Ben who shared the photo of his fish for all of his FB friends to see, I took a moment to scroll through his Facebook page and lt looked alot like my own teenage sons. But what I did notice was that while Ben had done a lot of Kokanee fishing with his Grandpa and had had some banner mornings there wasn't a photo anywhere of him holding a single kokanee. Thats Okay with us Ben, we understand!
