Leave No Child Inside: Take the kids fishing

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Check out the hump on this big bass that Jack Sisson, 8, of Grayslake, got recently while fishing in Wisconsin. | SPECIAL TO SUN-TIMES MEDIA

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Updated: September 7, 2011 12:18AM

Nine-year old Jack Sisson of Grayslake reeled in a real good day of fishing recently on Lake Delevan in Wisconsin when he landed his first ever northern pike (which I like to call weed wolves) and then a whopper bass.

“He wanted to catch his first northern and he did,” said his father, Matt Sisson. “Then he got that bass. He was really pumped.

“He’s obsessed with fishing just like I was as a kid,” he said.

The fish were caught on an outing July 2 to Delevan Lake, Wisconsin. They were using bobbers with 5-inch northern suckers dropped just outside the weed bed. Jack was fishing with his father and a family friend, Mark LeGrand of Lindenhurst. It was LeGrand’s boat.

The northern was 24 to 26-inches and the bass weighed 6-pounds plus. Both were released to fight another day.

And how did the old guys do? They were both skunked.

Jack already is honing his skills as an angler who ribs his buddies when they don’t catch anything.

“I told them ‘You guys didn’t catch anything,’” he said, rubbing it in. But he is very philosophical for a 9-year-old.

“I was out (Friday) and I didn’t catch anything and everyone else did. It was OK,” he said.

He said when he caught his bass he thought it was another northern. “It had a really good fight on it... Then I saw the stripe on the back and I said it’s a bass,” he recalled.

He was 3-years-old when he caught his first little sunfish in a detention pond in Grayslake near his home. He also spends a lot of time on loon Lake where his cousins have a house and he fishes with his grandfather, John Sisson.

“In the fall we catch a few perch and bring home dinner,” he said.

What does he like best about fishing?

“Just catching the fish and feeling the fight,” he said.

Leave No Child Inside is working for the Sissons.

Outer banks

I combined a furlough week with a visit to Corolla in the Outer banks of North Carolina with some of my wife’s relatives and were guests in a home owned by Dr. John and Karen Berry of Arnold, Maryland.

It actually turned into a great week of nature that included great porpoise sightings just 20 yards off the beach.

Actually, I don’t know if the groups we saw just offshore were dolphins or porpoises and according to experts you need to see their teeth to tell the difference and I was never that close.

When we saw the big fish playing we were on the northern end of the outer banks were you drive on the beach. We were looking for some of the wild horses that live there. Yes, it’s not just the west that has wild horses descended from the stables of Spanish Kings. There is a herd of over 100 and some of the other people in our party had seen some just the other day, including a cute little foal.

There is a whole organization that raises money and helps feed the herd occasionally with vitamin laced hay during the winter months.

There are lots of warning signs to stay six car lengths away because they don’t want people feeding them. They live among the sand dunes, which are covered in bayberry shrubs, wax myrtle trees (which are not too tall), and grasses like Sea Oats and American Beach Grass, which is also native to the Great Lakes region.

We also did a little surf fishing with Barry’s equipment, giant poles and reels for slinging the leader with large weights on it, using bloodworms (an alternative is using squid). I caught the first fish, a tiny croaker that makes that sound when it is out of the water.

My nephew, Austin Wolff, caught one too and I have to admit his was bigger. Both were released.

I get excited seeing large hawks here in Illinois and I got quite an Osprey show out there. One of the big birds was diving repeatedly right near us as we fished until he got a little fish and took off. I also saw one shadowing a bald eagle and I saw another one with a huge fish flying into the Currituck Banks North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve north of Corrola and within walking distance of where we were staying.

What seemed so funny is that the Osprey had the fish in its claws so the fish was pointing straight ahead, not like how you usually see eagles carrying a fish perpendicular to their body. And I could watch the line of pelicans swooping inches above the water at the beach all day. They look like they are riding a kiddie roller coaster as they glide up and down to avoid the waves.

Out at the Estuarine Research Reserve there was a great board walk built by Bill and Denise Crowell in honor of Erin Casey Crowell. One walk down the boardwalk revealed my first ever sighting of a Carolina wren.

At the end of the board walk I became fascinated in watching about 1,000 minnows swimming en mass back and forth, sometimes turning into a perfect ball. I wasn’t sure why they did this until I spotted two baby 6-inch gar.

They rounded them up like cowboys a couple of times and I watched long enough to see them dart into the mass of minnows trying to catch lunch. I got to see three successful strikes out of dozens of tries.

It was a memorable tip with lots of long walks on the beach. I’m still finding sand, but its a nice reminder of the good times I had with the relatives and nature.

Preserve closed

The Lake County Forest Preserve’s Daniel Wright Woods will be closed starting Monday so crews can reconstruct the site’s existing entrance road and parking area. It should be completed and reopened by Friday July 22 at 3 p.m.

The preserve is at the southern end of St. Mary’s Road. The ponds and trails are not closed and can be accessed by going through half Day Forest Preserve on Milwaukee Avenue in Vernon Hills or the Des Plaines River Trail.