I woke up feeling like I had slept with a knife stuck in the back of my neck all night, and so when the first thing I heard from Dylan was "can we go fishing now", it took all my will power to smile at him rather than tying him up with the fishing line and throwing him in as bait. A couple of painkillers soon settled the pain, albeit temporarily, and I was functional again. We had breakfast, which was the usual bacon, eggs and "toad in the hole - ( egg in the fried bread on the hot plate), cleaned up and then I finally set up some rigs to take Mr Excitable fishing.
Dylan insisted on doing everything himself, including casting the line out. Against by better judgement, I let him and after showing him how to do it, he did ok the first few times, before reminding us all not to stand within 10 metres at any angle when he is casting. Instead of the line going straight out where he was aiming, it somehow went 90 degrees to his right landing smack in the middle of the only clump of reeds in the 1 million plus square kilometres of water.
After retrieving the line minus the hook and sinker, I put together a new trace and threw in a bit of free training that he actually listened to this time, and left him to it.
With an expectation of him becoming bored in 3 minutes, I was pleasantly surprised to see him still sitting out there 2 hours later. There was plenty of tiny nibbles and bait missing, but no catching, so we headed back to the van for lunch.
No sooner had he swallowed the last mouthful of his second sandwich, Dylan was racing back to the lake with fishing rod and bait, accompanied by Tyler and Darcy. I decided that they didn't need me watching over them anymore so we all stayed put and settled in for an afternoon of camping fun.
With the drinks, food and tall tales flowing, I suddenly realised it was nearly 4pm and the kids - including Kayla - were still out on the jetty fishing. For a moment there, the thought of a 12, 9, and 7 year old spending 3 hours on a jetty fishing unsupervised made me start looking around for Child Welfare staff taking them into responsible care and us two parents being thrown in jail for 6 months. However, I wandered down and found them having the time of their lives and actually catching fish.
When I say fish, I actually mean 3" baby Redfin, but at least he had caught something. Turns out he started talking to complete strangers also fishing out there, and somehow managed to convince them to let him use their bait (which happened to be bacon!)
He then also managed to catch 2 decent sized carp, but as with all good fisherman's tales, these "huge fish" were nowhere to be seen because a pelican took them. A few people vouched for his story, so either he had somehow bribed everyone to tell the same story, or he did actually catch them.
Before I knew it, tea time was beckoning and everybody was starving. I cooked up some sausages and marinated steak, with a token spattering of green salad.
By the time clean up was done, Kayla had been showered and we had moved our chairs 5 times thanks to the weather unable to decide if it was going to rain or not, it was sunset and time fo take the mandatory sunset photos - although it turned out West is on the other side of the hill behind us, so I managed to snag a rainbow off to the East instead.
