The price of fishing

So we had a nice Mitchell Family shopping day today. We finally used our Toys 'R' Us gift card that Aunt Mel gave Jackson for Christmas I think, Renee picked up a couple of books, and I naturally got fishing lures...and a fishing book. Which got me thinking, some time back I mentioned that the outlay on fishing equipment was $109, truth be told I spent another $9 last week on modest lures at Wal-Mart and today's adventure set us back about $31 at Disk's Sporting Goods. So the new total is $149 and I will stop publicly tracking this before it gets scary.

I did get some Strike King Rage Tail Chunk lures, some Berkley Gulp Minnows, and a nice comprehensive fishing reference book, Henry Gilbey's Fishing. Obviously, the challenges that I have fishing are mostly practice related, essentially I have no idea what I am doing so the easiest combination possible would be nice. I like the lures a little bit larger because it gives them some heft enabling me to cast a bit further without complicated weights and rigging (tie line to hook, shove hook up backside of plastic lure until pointy end sticks out of the middle of the lure). I was having trouble with the Texas Rigging because I either wasn't getting bites or I couldn't tell I was getting bites. With a straight exposed hook I get stuck in the weeds and lose more lures but I get a nice solid stick on the fish. Today I caught what looked like a little Crappie, easily my smallest fish, not much bigger than my hand but he had a little fight to him and some nice colors.