Killing Time In Washington Park

Last Saturday morning my little girl woke up early so I took her on an impromptu fishing trip to Washington Park Pond to give my wife a chance to sleep a little more.  I came up with a list of achievements to unlock on the pond, but I had never fished it.  I figured it was time to unlock some of those achievements.

I took an empty baby food jar and we scrounged around under some leaves for half a dozen worms.  We started to walk around the pond and we came upon a rainbow trout that had the life squeezed out of it.  It was a nice size, over a foot long.

we stopped and made a cast near where we found the trout and let a worm soak, but had no action, so we continued to walk.  At our next stop, we found this poor snapping turtle left for dead.  he had swallowed the hook, and was clawing at the heavy weight line coming out of his mouth obviously in pain.  The other end of the line was hung up on sticks.  I cut the line as close as I dared to get, picked him up by the tail and put him back in the water.  I saw him surface for air once, then he was gone.

There were some fish jumping here, so we soaked another worm under a bobber, and quickly had a hit.  The fish sucked my bait off the line without taking the hook.  I took the bobber off, baited the hook again and made one more short cast.  Within seconds, my line was going tight.  I set the hook and reeled anxious to see what I had hooked.  The fish came to hand, and my mind was blown.

An 8" feral goldfish.  It was quite beautiful, way prettier than I'd expect a goldfish in the wild to be.  I always thought they'd be hard to distinguish from common carp.  Around this time, my wife texted me that she was awake, so we headed home.

Washington Park

Achievements Unlocked

1. (*) Garden Hackle (find worms on site)
2. (*) For Beginners (catch a fish)
3. (*) The Conqueror Worm (catch a fish on a worm)