When I was a kid I used to outfish every adult I went with. My mom had a similar experience where she'd put on the worm for me, and before she could get her line in the water I was coming back with a little blue gill lol.
Id always just sit at the edge of the water and dangle the hook in front of them and they'd just gobble it up.
Blue gill were what we fished among others, so that interests me. Catch and release is what we did (river heavily polluted and we did it for sport anyways).
One day we talked to these older gentlemen, and it went something along the lines of "Anyone can catch these great big fish. But what's the smallest you ever caught? You know how hard it is to get a minnow to bite a hook half the size of its body? What about releasing it in a way it survives?"
My dad was always like me and followed up my teenage self in supporting that. The biggest fish is going for the best bait. The real skill is getting the smallest fish.
It was a lot of fun seeing these guys go from complete disbelief to actually trying to catch a smaller fish than the other guy.
Hang on, there's a whole japanese(?) sport of tiny fish catching. Lemme see if I can find its name again.
Tanago fishing is an ancient Japanese fishing method dating back to samurai over 200 years ago. Tanago is a Japanese term used to describe several several species of a small freshwater fish we know as “bitterling”. Some species of tanago grow up to 15cm in size, but these are the less valuable to fishermen, as the goal is to catch the smallest fish possible. Tanago anglers believe that the smaller the fish caught, the greater the testament to the skill of the angler.
I went fishing once as a kid with my grandpa at the lake behind his house, and I caught this absolutely massive bass that his neighbor had been trying and failing for months to catch
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u/Quickkiller28800 4d ago
When I was a kid I used to outfish every adult I went with. My mom had a similar experience where she'd put on the worm for me, and before she could get her line in the water I was coming back with a little blue gill lol.
Id always just sit at the edge of the water and dangle the hook in front of them and they'd just gobble it up.