Son’s Favorite Fishing

As our kids get older and must start taking on more responsibilities, those things start cutting into their favorite past times, fishing. So, when a free afternoon comes along, and he wants to go fishing, he gets to pick where we go and how we will be fishing.

He has a favorite lake in New Hampshire that he likes to fish for Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass. His favorite technique at catching some of these fish is to set out tip-ups and bait them with shiners. In New Hampshire, we are allowed 6 lines per angler, so I typically don’t jig so that we can capitalize on the full number of flags to be chasing.

This lake, we fish one specific spot anytime that we are there, which is usually a few times a winter. The area is a small rock point outcropping coming off the side of a land point, the tip of it the water is around 5 feet deep.

First tip-up always goes right on the tip of this point and this trip didn’t disappoint once again. We didn’t even have the second tip-up into the water yet and the first one went off. My son ran over to it and caught a nice 2.5 pound largemouth.

As we progressed on working at getting the rest of the tip-ups set, we had already caught a few more bass and pickerel. We generally use a larger shiner so that the perch will leave them alone but we still had many flags where the fish dropped the bait and we attribute that to the perch.

We will setup these tip-ups around the area in water from 5 – 15 feet of water so that we have a variety of depths covered. This way, in an area, you are offering the fish a bait at whatever depth they are coming through and usually within a couple of hours, you will start seeing their travel lanes.

It was a fun afternoon and I know that he really enjoyed being able to get out there and catch some nice fish. Spending time with family on the ice is something that they will remember for many years to come, just like when I was growing up with my father. All of the fish were released to swim another day for others to enjoy like we had.