Fishing tips and gear for kids

Like I am, you may often be plagued by the nagging knowledge that your children spend too much time with an electronic device of one sort or another glued to their hands and faces, with their behinds glued to a couch. The nagging part is knowing that you should probably be doing something about it. While I don’t have any tips for getting them unstuck, I do have some tips to help them catch fish once you get them to your local Lake, Pond or Creek.

So you’ve worked your parental magic and they’re ready to fish! Where do you go from here?

First, let’s start with Rod selection. If you have young children, from the ages of two to eight or so, who aren’t adept at fishing, you may want to select a simple closed face, push-button rod and reel. They are intuitive to use, usually have line spooled onto the reel (although if you know how, you may want to use stronger line than what comes with it), come in your childs’ favorite cartoon theme and cost usually less than $20 USD at your local big-box or outdoor retailer. If your child is a bit older, nine and up or experienced at fishing, opt for a spinning reel or even a baitcaster, although the latter takes some time to master.

Next, let’s take a look at Lure selection. Although the old tried and true worm-n-bobber never fails for catching Bluegill and sunfish, if you don’t like ending a hapless earthworms life, getting slime all over everything including you (trust me they’re going to want YOU to bait the hook) or you just want to target bigger, more exciting species like Bass, grab a pack of soft plastic artificial baits and a few hooks. Kids often don’t care about the quality or size of the fish, they just want to catch LOTS of them, so the smaller EWG Bass hooks 1/0 and 2/0 and smaller baits 3.5” or less is probably a good rule of thumb. Generally the smaller the lure you use, the more fish you will catch. It may be tempting to buy hard baits with treble hooks (the hooks with 3 prongs) attached, however, these can quickly become a nightmare when dealing with a fighting fish, even for professional anglers. In the hands of an inexperienced child, they are basically a weapon. Trust me, I know from experience that getting treble hooks back out of human flesh is way more difficult than removing them from a fish. All of the lures that I am going to recommend except one have hook points that aren’t exposed, saving you a potential trip to the hospital.

So with that lengthy warning out of the way, let’s look at the specifics. Children often don’t understand the subtle nuances of what’s called “working” a lure, or making a lure look to the fish like it’s a living thing that they want to eat. However, there are certain lures that almost can’t be fished wrong and look like a living thing in the water no matter what you do to them. Here are the top five that I started my own two boys with:

#1: Stick Bait

The “Stick Bait” known as a Senko, or Dinger is also called the do-nothing or cheat-bait for a reason: it works itself. No matter what your kid does with it, it will wiggle and shake and swim all on its own. Encourage them to get crazy with it, or just cast it out and let it sink. This is a bait they can have fun with. It comes in two common sizes, the 3” and the 5” inch. Either will work, the smaller will catch more fish, but the bigger one looks and functions a bit better in the water. It can be rigged (put on the hook) in any number of different ways. There are specialized hooks for this that have belly weights or nose weights and it can even be fished on a jig (a hook with the weight attached) but one of the best ways to fish it is on a plain, light-wire 1/0-2/0 EWG or worm hook. All of these things can be found at your local retailer for less than $5 USD for hooks and plastics.

#2: The Ned Rig

This lure up until the last few years was actually a trade secret. When things got tough and the fish stopped biting, out came the ned rigs. The Ned Rig will entice finicky fish on a bad day to bite, which translates on a good day to a LOT of bites, which translates to an entertained child. The ones I use most of the time with my kids are the Z-Man lures Bullet HeadZ, that can be rigged Texas-style (with the hook point unexposed) they can be found at your local sporting goods store or even Walmart sometimes, however they are sort of expensive, 5$+ USD per pack of three or so. If you can’t find them, you can get a regular Ned Rig or Mushroom Head Jig with the hook exposed, but with a wire guard attached. There are specialized plastics also by the Z-Man brand that you can pair with it, or you can simply bite off a bit of another regular soft plastic, or attach a small grub or creature bait to it.

#3: Skirted Mini-Jig:

Most fishermen will agree that most fish can be caught year-round, most of the time by one of the most used lures of all time: The Skirted Jig. While this lure is one that can take a lifetime to master, there is also not a whole lot you can do wrong with it, besides casting it into a tree (which happens a LOT with kids). You can use pretty much anything as a trailer (the soft plastic you attach to the hook) that waves or wiggles as you reel or move the lure and almost all skirted jigs have a “weed guard” that keeps the hook from easily catching in weeds or your kids’ fingers. Keeping with our theme of smaller lures catch more fish, there are skirted jigs that are small and can be found at your local retailer as well. The Strike King Bitsy Bug or Booyeah Baby Boo are two inexpensive and smaller options. These baits are exceptionally good in small rivers or creeks but work anywhere all year long.

#4: The Swimbait:

If I had to pick one lure to fish with for the rest of my life it would probably be the Swimbait. Bass and Large Panfish like Crappie eat mostly other, smaller baitfish and nothing else mimics a baitfish like a Swimbait. The reason that this bait is #4 for me and not #1 is that you have to get your kid to cast out and reel the line back in over and over. They can’t just do what they want with it. However if you can convince them to do this, a small 3.5” Swimbait like the Keitech easy shiner just really can’t be beat for ease of catching large numbers of Bass. These also have specialized “Swimbait” hooks that they can be used with, however on a light-wire 1/0 or 2/0 Texas-rigged EWG they will wobble back and forth like a wounded or disoriented bait fish, which can provoke a strike from a Bass.

#5 The Ball-Head Jig:

For numbers and multiple species in one outing, it’s hard to beat the plain old Ball-Head jig. They will catch Bass, Crappie, Bluegill, Green Sunfish and every other common species that eat small living prey in your area. The only reason I didn’t rank this higher is that they constantly get hung up due to the hook being exposed, which translates to more work for you and more whining from them. The Ned Rig is #2 because they can be fished the same way as the Ball-Head with the hook unexposed. But if you’re in clear, open water it’s hard to beat these for the young ones. Put a curly tail grub on the end of one and reel it in slow. Just about as simple as it gets!

Find a local Lake, Pond or River nearby with the Fishbrain app www.fishbrain.com or Fishbrain on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store, go to the body of water, find some structure (logs, rocks, weeds) and cast near it. This one sentence (way too narrowly) sums up the fine art of Bass fishing, but it really is the gist of it.

Advice for getting your child interested in fishing:

Now that we’ve covered gear and location I’ll end this with some wisdom that escaped me during my first few outings with my kids: Don’t force them to go. Push, prod and pull but don’t ever force them, nothing will turn them away from something faster. Remember, they really just want to spend time with you. That means sacrificing YOUR fishing time to untangle line, undo hangups, look at weird bugs, feed food and whatever else you DON’T have to do when you fish or spend time by yourself. So don’t go out expecting a perfect day, but know that if you help them practice and learn that you will have a fishing partner for the rest of your life and they’re one step closer to having a healthier behavior than staring at a screen all day.