Father son gator gar trip report

First i wanna say i am a proud dad. My son is just amazing. It actually started wednesday looking with a buddy ofmine where to get carp for this trip. We castnet from the kayak all the time just dont target carp much so trying to figure out where to guarantee them was hard for us. Not to mention we are swamped at work and i am starting at work at 5am and ending about 4 or 5pm. My bro went solo wed night and early thursday morn with no luck. I get off at 3 thursday so i go try another spot. I see schools of big shad everywhere swirling on the surface of the water, most of these shad were over 12" so i fill 2 coolers with big shad and 2 carp, enough for 3 people, figuring how much bait you loose gar fishing. So now we are set on bait. Needed a few supplies and since bait was my main consern i figured id stop at walmart on the way to the spot. Plus i had all the gear loaded and everything has to sit out on the back of my flatbed truck i needed someone to stay with the truck so nothing walks away. Text buddy who was also going with us and last minuite he has to cancel. No prob. Go get my son and start our drive south. Stopped at a walmart and they close at 8:30 pm??? Wow. So now we stop at a 7-11 for food and water. 3 gallons of water and 4 cans of raviolies and 1 bag of beef jerky. Not what i had hoped for but we will make it work. We pull up to the spot and now its like 12:30 or 1am and dark as heck. Its also 3x muddier than you could possibly imagine. Hahaha. Lots of us know how those can be fun launches. The water has a ton of metal chunks right there too and that ended up making us choose to paddle a different way than we have before. Turns out we couldve got through but in the dark, tired and just ready to get camp set up we took the unobstructed route. Get to our chosen camp spot for the night and get set up, by set up i mean spread out a tarp on the ground. Hahaha. We packed as light as possible. I know most 14 year olds arent willing to sleep outside on only a tarp next to a river full of bugs, snakes and such. Hahaha. We get 2 rods casted out each with 16"-18" gizzard shad. 5 mins later we are getting a run. Gar are hard to hook so you have to let them have the bait a long time. Hook set attempt failed. Several more runs, several more falures. Next run my son sets the hook and this time it hooked. After 15 or so hard mins he gets it to land and its a solid 5 ft long. He handled it by himself like a boss. The rest of the night there were several more runs but no more fish. The next day we pack up our camp and go upstream a few miles mostly exploring and thinking if we want to change camps or not. Didnt fish much sat untill the night. We decided to cut 1 carp that was 15 lbs in half and run those as baits. If those rods took off it was gonna be huge. Well both baits got took several times. One run my braid seemed to not want to come off the reel and the fish actually ripped one of my flush mount rod holders out. Tons of runs, tons of snags, lots of lost gear but tons of fun. Thetrip was filled with a ton of great father son moments and long talks about whos gonna beat who and what we are gonna eat in the morning on the drive home.

Awesome post. Lifetime Memories.

Awesome!

What river were y'all on?

What a great trip!! Shoot me a private message if you want to know how to catch every gar that makes a run. You don't use a hook except to hold the bait. Learned it in 1967 when I caught my first (76 lb) on the Trinity with the Dallas skyline in the background!