ResearchCatching Your First Fish
Fishing involves hours of sitting and waiting, punctuated with brief moments of suspenseful excitement. You will learn after one or two outings that actually catching fish is largely a secondary objective. Your primary goal is to be happy in your natural surroundings.
The thing that will be hardest to get used to is getting up early. Don't think you can hit the fishing spot at eleven and catch anything; your day should be half-over by then. You want to hit the water at four, five in the morning, which means being up before the sun. People shouldn't be fishing if they aren't naturally morning people.
You'll have your best results with live bait. If you're using a nightcrawler, you want to run it through with the hook as many times as possible, since it's trying to squirm off the whole time. As for things like crayfish and sand crabs, you want to get the hook into a fleshy part of the tail, being sure that the shell will catch the barb and hold the hook in place.
And now for the challenging part, casting the line without catching yourself, which isn't as easy as it looks. Every novice fisher has hooked themselves while casting exactly one time, since the pain and humiliation of the ordeal is enough to remind them never to do it again.
First, you want to release a little length of the line, so your bait and your sinker are hanging a good six inches from the tip of your rod. Next, lock the spool. Casting a line is similar to throwing a ball, as you release each at the center of the throw's arc. Tip your rod back over your shoulder or alongside your waist for being extra careful, letting the bait and sinker settle into its momentum, and swing it forward in a fluid motion. The part that takes coordination is releasing the lock on your spool at precisely the right moment. If you release it too soon in the cast, you've got a decent chance of getting a hook in your back; release it too late, and you catapult your hook and sinker into the mud five feet in front of you.
Be patient, because you will not do this correctly the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But once you've managed a nice cast, reel the line in a little to eliminate slack. And then relax, congratulating yourself on your success so far.
When you feel something jerking your line, or the tip of the rod is nodding up and down, there is probably something picking at your bait. At that point, lift up and back sharply. You are trying to get the hook embedded somewhere in your target. This takes some subtlety. Pull too hard, and you'll break your line and lose the bait and a perfectly good hook, to say nothing of the fish. A firm, quick tug up should suffice. Then reel in a little and wait. If you still feel some tugging, you've probably got something hooked.
I hope you weren't expecting that that's all there is to it, because this is the part where it gets interesting. This is the part where you and the fish engage in battle. This is somewhat easier than taking on, say, a cougar, but you will need some skill. Your job at this point is to neither break your line nor give the fish enough breathing time to wiggle free. No two species of fish fight in quite the same way. Indeed, experienced fishermen can identify the fish by it's fighting technique. The fish will do anything it can think of to escape; it will swim back and forth, dive for cover at the bottom amidst the debris, jump out of the water in all directions, and even play tricks on you like making the line go slack and then suddenly pulling hard. Just keep pulling and reeling in, as long as you can feel something alive on the other end. Snapping your line and losing some equipment is just a part of life sometimes, though.
Good luck, and happy trolling!