Last evening, I took a couple of rods into my back yard. I was practicing casting with my Winston, and testing out the new March Brown travel rod I recently bought for my oldest son. I tied yarn to the leaders in place of flies, and proceeded to cast away in my back yard.
While I was casting, my daughter and youngest son (ages 9 and 6) came out to see what I was doing. “What are you doing, Daddy she said?”
“Fishing” I said
“What are you fishing for?”
It was then I noticed several rabbits hopping around (we have tons of wild rabbits in our neighborhood.)
“I’m fishing for rabbits.” I told her.
“Wow, I didn’t know you could do that. What are you using for bait?”
I pointed at the piece of green yarn tied to my tippet and told her; “I’m using a special fly, designed to imitate leafy lettuce.”
I then proceeded to stalk the wild rabbits. It was actually pretty fun. If I presented the “lettuce fly” to them very carefully and from far enough away, they wouldn’t run, but just continued on munching grass. With my 6x tippet, I could get the “fly” right on them and they didn’t care. However, if I got too close, or was sloppy in my cast and screwed up my presentation, they would get spooked and run off. It was very good fly casting practice, and kept my kids entertained. They were very excited to see me land a rabbit with my fly rod. At one point, when one of the rabbits hopped over next to my “lettuce fly” they just about burst.
Sadly, no rabbits rose to take my lettuce fly, and I ended up not catching any rabbits (or even any strikes.) It was definitely a fun and unusually challenging practice session, however. My six year old is convinced that if I had changed to an orage carrot simulator fly that we would have had more success.
