What is Good With It

I was sitting around being bored one afternoon and decided I wanted to go fishing. I realized all my rods and my tackle box were on my dad’s boat in New Kent. I could have driven an hour out there and fished in the pond behind my parents’ house but I felt like doing something different.

         So I went to Academy sports and got a rod and reel combo and a pack of rooster tail small spinners. I cut the tags off and tied a bait on in the parking lot and then drove down to Midlothian-Mines Park. Not far from my apartment.

         The park has a large pond on it surrounded by trees. There are only a couple of access points where you can actually cast around the pond. There are two fishing piers basically at the corners of the pond and a bridge that crosses it close to the end.

         The pond was full of grass. I did the best I could to reel fast enough to just tick the tops of the grass with my little spinner. It went okay. I picked up a little bit of grass on almost every cast.

         I tried fishing from every spot I could and there was only one spot where you could slightly escape the grass.

         It was on the bridge. The bridge was near one end of the pond so it only cut off a small shallow area on the backside of it and on the front side was the deeper wider part of the pond that was choked off with grass.

         I tried fishing the first fishing pier then the bridge then the second pier all with no luck and a little frustration over how much grass there was in the pond.

         Every single place I fished all you could see was grass and turtles. It seemed like there may have been 1 million turtles in this pond. Everywhere you looked there were big and small turtles swimming or sitting on logs. But since turtles weren’t what I was after I kept casting with some hope and looking for fish.

         I made my way back to the bridge and was looking in the shallows on the backside of it. There was less grass in there but some and the water was clear. But I thought it would be too shallow to even a hold a fish.

         I saw some small bait fish in the shallows and decided to just cast in there and watch their chase response initiate. Or see if they would swim away from my bait. The water was just deep enough that I could get my spinner spinning. Usually as soon as I casted the bait was on the bottom but I was able to reel it just fast enough to keep it moving and still under the water.

         I was just enjoying watching the small fish see my bait and make a decision about swimming towards it or swim away.

         Then one cast I didn’t even see any fish but all of the sudden a small fish came swimming out of the grass and attacked my bait with a ferocity none of the other fish had shown.

         The fish was hooked immediately and because it wasn’t very big, I pulled it up with almost no effort. But it turned out to be a largemouth bass. A very small one none the less but still a bass.

         I unhooked him and threw him back and just started smiling about the fact that I’d caught a fish.

         I noticed recently that if I catch a fish,

 I always count that as a good day no matter what else goes on. That’s something I wish everyone could find. It doesn’t have to be catching a fish but some small thing that just makes your day.

         I kept smiling the rest of the day just thinking about that one tiny little fish. I was thinking about how I could have sat at home and watched tv. But it was so much more satisfying to catch one fish and be in God’s creation.

         I could have complained how the fishing wasn’t good because of the grass. But if I had just given up and gone home I wouldn’t have caught a fish or seen the million turtles, or the ducks, or geese, or squirrels that I saw.

         Sometimes it is just the simple little things that make all the difference. People spend too much time complaining about all of the things that are wrong with the world. I think the solution is for everyone to go outside and think about what is right with it.