My husband is an avid fisherman. He has been fishing since he was a small boy. His father would take him and his brothers as he was growing up. In the summers he and his brother would ride their bikes for miles to fish from shore on area lakes. Some of his fondest memories of his youth involve fishing trips that he took with his dad and brothers.

My family fished very little. We would go to area lakes and fish from shore, my father never owned a boat. We had cheap rods and reels and we used bobbers the size of tennis balls. When I started dating my husband it was during the winter. He asked me to go ice fishing with him. I had never been ice fishing so I thought this sounded like fun. We borrowed his dad’s portable fish house and went out to an area lake for our first of what was to become many fishing trips. I found the entire process of auguring the holes in the ice and setting the depths of the lines very intriguing. I could not believe the small bobber that he put on my line. He taught me to watch for the slightest movement of the bobber and then to set the hook and bring the fish in. We now use ice fishing rods with small reels on them but back then we had the rods with the line wrapped around two pegs. When you caught a fish you had to lay the rod down and pull the line up hand over hand until the fish came out of the hole. That first day got me hooked on ice fishing because we each caught our limit of big sun fish.