I am a lucky man to be off the whole week every year for holidays and spring break, this year would be a little different for us since we cut out the beach party action and included some hunting and fishing.  I have to use my time away from wisely and plan trips to the coast or the ranch carefully to get the most out of this precious moments.  This Spring Break me and my ten year old son had two things in mind, doing some hog hunting and chasing some Redfish in shallow water.  The first day of our Spring Break vacation was spent driving down to my dad's hunting lease near Benvaides TX, this would be a special hunting trip because I also invited my friend Felix who had taken us dove hunting at his ranch in San Diego.  I believe in repaying favors and he has a great night vision set up on his "Bushmaster" AR-15, a perfect set up for hog hunting.  We arrived at the ranch just in time to bait the "hog pipe", senderos and any other area that we thought would attract hogs.  The hunt started off good with two Javelina visiting our feeder early and gave us a good opportunity to shoot early, but we passed on the first group.  These two Javelina moved on to the feeder where my son and dad were posted and then four Javelina began eating corn at their sendero.  By 5pm the shot from my son's single shot .22 cal "cricket" rang out as he dropped the female in the goup with one shot to the head.  We saw plenty more Javelina's and small pigs that evening but allowing my son to harvest his first Javelina was well worth the trip down south to the ranch.

    Our next Spring Break sporting opportunity came on Saturday early in the morning as we planned to do some shallow water fishing in Port Aransas.  We arrived to the fishing spot around 9am with a bucket of live shrimp and began working the oyster crushed shoreline searching for cruising fish.  Usually the person to catch the first fish is the lucky one or best fisherman of the day and that would be me.  I quickly had a strong hit on my second cast and had high hopes it could be a nice Red or big drum, but as it came close to shore it would only be a big hardhead.  Talk about having your dreams smashed, but the news would only get worse, the fish stopped bitting for two hours, not even hardheads, pearch, croaker, nada!!!  We continued to work the shoreline at least 1000 yards  down to another oyster reef point.  We noticed that bad weather was moving in and rain clouds would building.  Once again, I had another strong bite and reeled in a beautiful Red that was just a bit undersized.  I released the rat red and continued to fish the small honey whole.  I missed a couple of good bites when all of a sudden I saw my son with his brand new Shimano spinning reel bent over.  He fought the fish with a big smile and it got even bigger once he saw that it was another nice Red.  We decieded to let him go and pack up and call it a good day with the bad weather coming in quickly. 

    I am proud to say that I had the wonderful opportunity to take my son hunting and fishing over his Spring Break vacation, he would not even have had to kill or catch anything to have a good time.  But I am glad that he did, I hope that we continue to have more outdoor sporting adventures and lookl foward to spending time in the outdoors with my son.

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