Fishing

A few weekends ago it was free fishing day at the fish hatcheries in Oregon.  Basically you can take your kiddos under 12 to the hatchery and let them drop a pole into the water and catch a fish without having to have a license or anything.  I can't believe we haven't done this before... it was really fun!  We drove up fairly early in the morning with my friend Michelle and her girls.  The hatchery workers gave each kiddo a pole and some worms and then Phil loaded up the hooks and we plunked the line into the water and literally within a few seconds each kiddo was reeling in a fish!  A few times it took a couple casts to get a bite, but there were so many fish in the stream that a bite usually happened pretty quickly.  Here are some pictures from the day...

This is a picture of all of the fish in the stream.  Not sure if you can see them that well, but there were TONS!

Reid wanted to get in that water so badly...

Here's a hatchery worker holding Jackson's fish... when they saw that a kiddo had a fish on the workers would run over with a net to help them bring it to shore.

Jackson did not want to touch the fish... you can see him trying to be brave in this picture!

Watching the fish get whacked in the head...

Jackson got to go twice to catch "Reid's" fish...

MVI_3491.AVI from Heather G on Vimeo.

Aaaggghh!  Reid escaped!  Here he's headed for the water before I cut him off.  I was official picture-taker and Reid-protector....

One of the rules of this day was that you had to take your fish home with you.  So we ended up with five rainbow trout in our group...

Happy baby!

Everyone checking out the fishies again...

When we got home Phil went behind our fence to clean the fish.  The kiddos really liked watching that!

Aren't they pretty?  Phil marinated them with something and then put them on our grill to smoke a bit and they actually came out really yummy.  I thought they would be super fishy tasting but they weren't.