The Young and the Restless | Trout farm fishing = easy pickings

I struggle tremendously to sit still for any length of time.

Of course, I have experienced the jubilation of landing the catch of the day before and it sure does deliver an exhilarating blend of happiness, satisfaction and pride.

While my kids have dabbled in river, lake and beach fishing with grandparents, uncles and myself on occasion, only one of them had ever caught anything — and you can probably guess what it was.

That’s right, a dirty old carp.

Equipment-wise we don’t have much more than a few cheap Kmart rods.

We don’t stay licensed.

We don’t have know-how on the best fishing spots or the best seasonal times.

We couldn’t identify a particular fish species to save our lives (except carp).

We’re not educated on what we’re allowed to keep and what we have to throw back.

We don’t own a boat suitable for fishing, or an adult capable of reversing a trailer with that phantom boat on it anyway.

But I did think it would be a great idea to take my kids on an adventure to a trout farm one weekend for some instant fishing gratification without the outlay of expense for equipment, licences and precious time.

There’s some irony about that though.

The ponds we fished were so stocked there was a trout on your line the second it hit the water.

I was just helping one kid when the next called me, then the next, then back to the first and so on.

At trout farms, you have to keep what you catch, which translates to buying what you catch, too.

You’re charged in kilograms, so I made sure I asked what the fish in our allocated pond each weighed on average and did a rough calculation in my head about how much it was going to sting me per fish before I gave the kids an allocated quota. I had been warned this was an expensive activity.

I told the kids they could catch two fish each and I allowed myself one (just so I had a picture to stir my keen fisherman brother-in-law, who has caught many kinds of elusive fish in his life, but has always been outsmarted by the humble rainbow trout).

So for all our wanting to save time and a near two-hour drive to get there, we were done at the pondage within about 30 minutes.

And for all my wanting to save money on equipment and licences, on top of the fee for all of us to fish, I paid about 70 bucks for a cooler full of fish that I was never going to be able to cook because A) we’re not fans of the taste of freshwater fish, and, more importantly, B) after the trauma of having to whack them on the head and then watch them gutted and gilled (by farm staff, who thankfully do this for you at no extra cost) we wouldn’t have had the appetite.

But don’t worry, the fish didn’t die in vain, we shared them with friends and family who enjoyed the seasoned and grilled fruits of our — well, I’m not going to call it labour when it was as easy as shooting the same scaly creatures in a barrel.

There aren’t many tourist attractions you can find these days that provide smiles so large, delighted shrieks so loud and photos that are enormously brag-worthy for under a hundred bucks a family of four, but this is one.

Despite the swiftness, without the outlay or education needed to do it in the wild, it was a perfect foray into fishing for both the young and the restless.

— Bree Harding is a former News reporter and a single mother to three children.