By Spencer Durrant | Managing Editor
The best thing you’ll ever do as an angler is take a kid fishing.
It probably won’t be the most enjoyable, productive, or relaxing day. It’s likely you’ll get five minutes into the endeavor and wonder what the hell you were thinking. You’ll never regret it, though, and most importantly, the kids won’t ever forget the experience. In fact, I reckon it’s these memories, more so than other events, that spur kids into becoming lifelong, passionate anglers.
I was five or six the first time I remember going fishing with my dad. For some reason, I distinctly recall him telling my mother, “We’re going to the store.” We went in the opposite direction of the store, dad winked at me conspiratorially, and said, “Don’t tell your mom I took you fishing.”
Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and The Pet Shop Boys wavered through the car stereo as we drove. My dad’s musical tastes remain firmly planted in 80s New Wave and pop.
Thankfully, his fishing chops aren’t stuck in the 80s, and with minutes of rigging up on the riverbank, he had a brown trout in the net. We wet-waded a stream that meanders through a narrow mountain valley, running through a ghost town that was originally founded by my dad’s fifth-great grandfather back in the 1850s. The stream is one of those tiny affairs that’s somehow home to trout far bigger than what you’d expect.
One of those trout swam over my feet after dad let it go. It slithered, back half out of the water, on its way to deeper water. “Dad!” I yelled. “That fish just swam over my feet!”
Now, two decades after that muggy summer evening on the old family stream, I’m a semi-competent angler and hopefully above-average storyteller. Fishing is my living, but also my lifestyle. As a result, I spend hours with other folks who work in the industry, from guides to gear manufacturers to rod makers. Between shared stories of big fish and fawning over new gear, there’s an undercurrent of worry about the future of the sport.
It’s not a worry as persistent as what those in hunting have hanging over them — only 5% of Americans 16 and older hunt, per the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — but it’s a consistent question. Who’s going to look over the rivers and lakes that give us so many memories? That provide thousands of guides with a living? It’s such an intricate piece of the tapestry of our heritage here in the West, that any change is frankly unimaginable.
That’s why you need to take a kid fishing. They’re the next generation of stewards of this grand tradition, but only if they’re given the opportunity to fall in love with it in the way you and I have.
Luckily, my dad wasn’t about to let me grow up without the influence of fly fishing. I fell head-over-heels for the sport at a young age. Most kids don’t have that opportunity. Which is why, as inconvenient as it is at times, we have to steel ourselves for a day of tangled lines and lost flies, and take a kid fishing.
Spencer Durrant is a fly fishing writer, outdoors columnist, novelist, and bamboo rod builder from Utah. His work has appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Field & Stream, Southwest Fly Fishing Magazine, Hatch Magazine, Trout Magazine, and other national publications. Connect with Spencer on Twitter/Instagram, @Spencer_Durrant.
