Maya tied her first improved clinch knot at the kitchen table on the Friday before Labor Day, using a shoelace for line and one of Dana's hair clips as the hook. Then she tied it wrong nine times in a row. On the tenth try she pulled it tight, held it up to the light and said, "Okay. Now with the real thing."
Back in March at Bahia Honda she wouldn't touch a shrimp. Nico caught the snapper, ate the taco and has not stopped talking about it since. Maya ran the bait bucket and drew the fish. Sometime this summer she decided she was done being the bucket person, and she's ten, so once she decides something, it's decided. Over three mornings in eight days, at Black Point Marina, the two of us went fishing for real.
Starting on dry land
The PE teacher in me wanted to break it into small pieces before we went anywhere near water. Two evenings that week we practiced casting in the backyard with a rubber practice plug instead of a hook, aiming at a hula hoop on the grass under the mango tree. A spinning reel has one tricky sequence: open the bail, pin the line against the rod with your finger, swing, let go at the right moment, then close the bail by hand before you reel. Skip that last step and just crank, and you can end up with loops of loose line on the spool.
By the second night she was hitting the hoop about one cast in five. More important, she was doing the bail in the right order without saying it out loud. That's what grass is for. The boring part gets automatic before a fish shows up.
Three mornings at Black Point
Black Point Marina is about 20 minutes from our house, and the rocks along the channel seem to be where half of south Miami-Dade learns to fish. We got there at 7:15 each time, when it was about 82 degrees. By 9:30 it was 90 with a dew point around 76, and that was our cue. Ninety minutes is about right for a ten-year-old, and honestly for me.
Morning one, on Saturday, was mostly about the reel. On her fourth cast she cranked without closing the bail and made a bird's nest that took me 20 minutes to pick apart while she stood next to me getting quieter and quieter. This is where I almost lost it. Not at her, at the line, the heat and the man ten feet away pulling in a grunt every five minutes. I finally cut the mess out, retied it and handed the rod back without a speech, which was the right call and took more effort than it should have. She caught nothing and said on the drive home that it was "still fun, kind of."
Morning two, Sunday, Nico and Dana came along. Nico lasted about 40 minutes with a line in the water before he found the crabs on the rocks and spent the rest of the morning narrating their lives. Maya caught the first fish of her life, a white grunt about the size of her hand, and when it made its grunting noise she nearly dropped the rod. It went back in, and so did two small snappers that weren't close to the size limit.
Morning three, the next Saturday, she out-fished me: four grunts and a pinfish to my one grunt. I'm putting that in writing because she asked me to.
The bait question
Bait was frozen shrimp from Walmart, a few dollars a bag, kept in a small cooler. Morning one she wore a pair of Dana's kitchen gloves and held each shrimp like it was evidence. Morning two the gloves came off, but I did the threading. Morning three, at about 7:40, she picked a shrimp out of the bag, threaded it onto the hook herself, wiped her fingers on my shorts and cast. I didn't say a word. I wanted to.
The legal part stays with me. I'm the one with the license, $17 for the year, and the kids don't need one at their ages. I look up the size and bag limits before every outing because they change and I'm nobody's authority on them. We measure every fish, and so far we've kept none.
What kept us both patient
- Short sessions, out before the heat, ending while it's still fun.
- One adult per kid. When Nico comes, Dana comes too.
- I don't touch her rod unless she hands it to me.
- One correction at a time, then I stop talking.
- A snack break at 45 minutes, fish or no fish.
When we went to Academy for her new camp chair on Labor Day, she spent longer in the fishing aisle than the chair aisle. Last night she showed me a list in green and purple marker titled "MY TACKLE BOX": hooks in two sizes, split shot, two bobbers, pliers "that are mine," a tape measure, a rag and a small waterproof notebook for "data." She's saving her allowance for it and has already worked out that she needs about six more weeks. That lands right before Thanksgiving, and the bay side of St. George Island. She did that math on purpose.
