My three year old loves fishing and we were in Seagrove last week. We were near Eastern Lake and errantly thought we would be able to find access to fish there. So when he asked one morning if we could go fishing, I took him to buy some shrimps and rigged up both my simple spin reel and his little Transformers pole and we headed to the beach.
I've never had luck anywhere beach fishing so I tried to find an area with submerged rocks reachable from the beach with even the little two foot transformers pole. I rigged my son's first, cast it out above the submerged rocks with a little float bobber so he had something to watch, and I turned around to rig mine.
In maybe twenty seconds he told me he had something. I didn't believe him (he likes to reel in every ten seconds and often acts like he has something). So I turn around and I can see that his little pole clearly has something. No way, I thought.
So I help him...definitely something there...and out comes a decent-sized crab (no idea what kind...it was sand colored and maybe eight to ten inches wide. It had taken the shrimp and hooked itself.
My son was ecstatic. I released the crab, rebaited his hook and tossed out to the same place. Soon after I got mine in too. All in all, in about fifteen minutes we had caught and landed six crabs (four on the little Transformers pole) with shrimp on a hook. It was a good time for us boys that morning.
First thing my son said to my father in law (his usual fishing buddy) when we got back to Indiana several days later?
"Papa, I caught crabs in Florida!"