Wichita Eagle clinic offers fish schooling

In the wild grasslands of Chisholm Creek Park, under the sweltering sun, a skilled predator stalks her prey. She calls to it, taunting it.

“Here, fishy, fishy, fishy!” she calls. “Here, fishy, fishy!”

Before long, she has a 6-inch bullhead catfish in her clutches. But in a moment of mercy, the predator lets her prey go free, tossing it back into the lake with her bare hands.

“I’m not afraid of fish,” Kristen Fox, 9, said before recounting the various times she’s held frogs and rats – no problem.

A volunteer showed Kristen how to hold the catfish to toss it in the lake, but that was remedial knowledge for her.

“You’ve just got to know how to grip it but at the same time not grip it so hard you pop its head off,” she said. “You’ve got to really throw it out, too, unless it might hit a rock. The first time I threw a fish in, I threw it at a rock, but it was like a dynamite, superman fish. It jumped over it and kept swimming.”

Kristen, her sister and mother were among the more than 150 people who came to Chisholm Creek Park on Saturday for The Eagle’s 14th annual Kids Fishing Clinic. It was originally scheduled for the previous weekend but was rained out along with the Great Plains Nature Center’s Walk With Wildlife event.

Turnout was lower than last year, primarily because of the rescheduled date, organizers said.

The 95-degree heat and wind gusts played a part in delaying many kids’ catches on Saturday afternoon, but if they stuck with it, most did not leave empty-handed.

“Almost every kid has caught a fish,” said Juju Wellemeyer, a volunteer with the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism. She estimated about a 90 percent catch rate at the lake on Saturday.

Wellemeyer, who has been volunteering at the clinic for at least four years, said she saw children who had been coming to the clinic ever since she started, and fishing newbies.

“Everyone loves it, and they all get the same opportunity to catch a fish,” she said.

After all, fishing is all about patience.

Just ask Aleister Reed, 7.

He had been sitting on the bank of the lake for nearly 30 minutes and had gotten nothing.

Not even a nibble.

He slumped his head, and at times the tip of his fishing pole was in the water as well.

“I was hoping we’d be able to catch one in the first five minutes and go home,” Reed’s grandmother Shirley Estes said. “He doesn’t have much patience.”

After 25 minutes of waiting, she suggested he move his rod a little farther up the lake, as the wind had blown his bobber down a ways.

He picked up the rod, and all of a sudden, a 3-inch green sunfish was on the rod.

It never even bobbed. The fish was just there, on the line.

His eyes grew wide as he sucked in a big gulp of air, letting out a squeal as the fish squirmed midair.

“I caught one! I caught one!” he said, giving an Eagle reporter a high-five.

Melissa Fox, Kristen’s mother, said her family has been coming to the fishing clinic for at least the past five years.

“This is a way we can experience the outdoors with a minimal amount of effort on our part,” she said. “We’re not really outdoorsy people, but we’ve got a kid that’s super-outdoorsy. We look forward to this event every year. This way we can have the experience of going out and fishing without having to buy the equipment.”

Kristen said she wished she could hit the lake more often, but not owning a pole can be prohibitive to proper fishing.

“We had a fishing pole and it broke, but that’s what you get for buying a $5 fishing pole,” she said.

This story was originally published June 20, 2015 at 6:25 PM with the headline "Wichita Eagle clinic offers fish schooling."