Quote:
Originally Posted by eman
The best thing you can do to get an educational trip is go in the off season and leave the kids at home. I'm all for taking kids fishing .But if the guide has to help the kids he has less time for you. If you have to help the kids then your attention is not focused on where ,when and why.
The reason i say off season is during the heat of the summer it's easy to go out and catch a 5 man limit of trout and be back at the dock cleaning fish by 9 am.
The guides don't want to be out in the broiling sun any more than you do.
Make sure and tell the guide you want to hire that you want an educational trip and
That you want to learn the where and when and why for different seasons.
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Having taken quite a few of my children's friends fishing and talked with a number of charter boat captains about their experiences with children, I can certainly appreciate the expectation that captains have about how undisciplined, inattentive, and challenging children can be in a boat with hooks and fins flying about.
In contrast, my boys have been fishing since they were about four and each landed his first 39" Muskie at age 5 or 6. We put over 500 fish in the boat last year, over 200 on our Louisiana trip. The big redfish in the picture was boated by my daughter and my younger son caught an even bigger one. My kids are better anglers than me, usually limiting out first and usually catching bigger fish to boot. I'm a bit better at precision casting, but that's about it. The girls prefer not to break blue crabs apart, but other than that most of the help they need is someone to net the fish when it gets to the boat. My children are attentive, disciplined, and obedient to instructions, especially when we're on the water.
We've been on at least a half a dozen trips where the charter boat captain was quite capable of managing the fishing while simultaneously providing us with an extremely useful education regarding why he was doing what he was doing. I've only been fishing once without my kids in the last 12 years, and that was a spur of the moment deal when I was visiting my brother. The half dozen or so charter boat trips where I don't think the captain did a very good job educating us were cases where I felt that he was keeping some cards close to the vest and reluctant to share what he knew.
I'm not too interested in travelling 2800 miles (1400 each way) for a one day off season fishing trip to learn less information (wrong season, less poles in the water) than I could learn in a one day charter trip at the beginning of a two week vacation. You're always going to learn more with six baits in the water than with two or four, because your fellow anglers are trying different things and most of the time the other folks in the boat will quickly switch gears once one angler finds a technique that works. And two or three experienced anglers in the charter boat will retain more for later use than one.
Finally, parents take note, I can remember feeling left out when my dad would bring home a cooler full of fish from his charter trip, but never took us on a charter trip or came anywhere close to helping us reach that level of success. My kids and I fish together, empty coolers and full.