Happy Camping, Happy Vacation-3

When we decided to join this camping, I did a little research about Clear Lake State Park ( http://www.clearlakestatepark.org/ ) and learned that it's a good fishing place. Then, I did a little research about getting the fishing license and learned that July 4th is a "free fishing day" which means no license is required on July 4th.

I started getting excited about having BBQ fish as our camping dinner because one of our friends' dad is very good at fishing. According to her, he used to be a fisherman, and now, he still goes fishing almost every day. We've never gone fishing before, and since we went camping on the free fishing day, it's a good opportunity for us to experience it once.

I went shopping for the fishing gear with kids on Thursday. Target only had 3 fishing poles, so we went to Walmart instead. Walmart had good collections of fishing gears, and we chose a $15 combination fishing pole. Then, I discovered that besides fishing pole, we still needed some small gears, such as hooks, floats,weights...., so I used the best of my knowledge (actually, I know nothing about fishing gears. I should say "my best guessing") and compared the gears in the Fancy boxes ($10 per box, it's not worthy to buy it) to choose the ones which are good for catching Catfish. Walmart also sold ready-made baits for different kinds of fish, about $4 per box, but I thought that the bait is too much for one time use. The bait for Catfish was made of liver and cheese, so I went to the market to buy pork liver. It's only $1.25, and we ate half of the box.

That night, by the help of Youtube, Stephen assembled the fishing pole, and we were ready to go.

We didn't do anything on July 3rd, and we started fishing at around 4pm on July 4th.

We prayed before fishing, but it was too early, and the fish was still at their nap, so after 10 minutes, Stephen decided to leave. He didn't like to waste time sitting there and doing nothing, so he chose a good spot and tied the poles there. He went to check it at 9pm, but no fish yet, and he decided to leave it there overnight. He used to catch the fish when he was young, so he knew a little about where and when is the best to catch the fish.

Monday morning, he went to check the pole, and I was in the tent hearing him saying " I got the fish, and I need a bucket!" I gave him the bucket which was one of the beach toys, but it was too small. We went to find the friends' dad, and he got a net, and he helped Stephen to get the fish out and clean the fish because he has more experiences of doing so.

We had 2 leftover green onions from Sunday breakfast ( God prepared it for us. For some reason, I did use all of the green onions for my 蛋餅 and 炒蛋， and people who's in charge of Sunday lunch, dinner or Monday breakfast didn't need the green onions, so I kept them in the cooler), and that's the only seasoning that we had besides sugar and salt. The friends' mom helped us to panfry and made the fish soup.

Surprisingly, it tasted so good，一點都不腥！So yummy! Most people had the soup before they left, and we believed that it's the gift from God. It's the perfect and memorable ending for our camping trip!

Here is the video clip of catching the fish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Moaw1RX3o

Stephen and friends' parents