There was a 10-year-old kid on the Horizon last week who spent the whole 2.5-day trip fighting seasickness and catching yellowtail anyway.
He'd disappear below deck for a stretch, try to sleep it off, then come back up to the rail and keep fishing. His dad — they'd come in from Arizona — and his uncle, who'd flown in from one of the Carolinas to make the trip happen, fished alongside him the whole time. Every time the kid hooked up, the whole boat seemed to lean in. People shouted encouragement. The deckhands made sure he got the gaff. When the fish hit the deck, there was a kind of collective exhale and a round of "atta boys" from anglers who didn't even know him.
As a trio, they probably caught more yellowtail than anyone else on the boat.
I watched them on and off for two and a half days and thought a lot about how fishing actually gets passed down.
It's not always the obvious path
The clean version of the fishing legacy story is: father takes son fishing from age five, son grows up fishing, son takes his own kids fishing, fishing in the family forever.
That's the story I grew up assuming was the "right" one. It's the one in the magazine ads. It's the one on Father's Day cards.
It's also not how it actually worked for most people I know.
For me, my dad didn't take me fishing much. What he did do was take me — and all my siblings, each in turn, when we turned 10 — on a backpacking trip up Mt. Tallac in Lake Tahoe. We did countless camping trips together. Hiked all over wherever he was living. The outdoors was the gift he gave us. The specific activity changed depending on the season and the place.
He didn't hand me a fishing rod. He handed me a relationship with being outside. Fishing came later, on its own, when I was old enough to seek it out.
I think that matters. I think a lot of anglers came to fishing the same way — through a parent or grandparent who didn't necessarily fish, but who pointed them at the natural world and let them find their own version of it. The form changes. The substance continues.
The next generation
I have a daughter. She's 20 now and lives out of state. She and her fiance do some freshwater fishing together.
When she was 5 or 6, I started taking her down to the pier. Easy stuff — nothing serious, just being out there. When she was 10, we went on a twilight trip out of 22nd Street Landing on the Monte Carlo. Her first time on a sportfishing boat. She loved it. The catching, the being on the water, the whole experience.
I won't pretend I've been the dad who took her every weekend since. Life got busy. Years went by between trips sometimes. But she still likes it when she comes out, and now she's doing it on her own — with her partner, in different waters, on her own terms.
That's what I hoped for, honestly. Not that she'd inherit my exact relationship with fishing — but that being on the water or in nature would mean something to her. It does.
If you're thinking about taking someone fishing for the first time, half-day and 3/4-day trips are the best starting point. Find a beginner-friendly trip at findyournextcatch.com/trips.
What you see if you spend enough time at the landings
Spend enough time around SoCal sportfishing and a pattern shows up over and over: this fleet runs on multi-generation relationships.
Some of the landings themselves are family-owned across generations. Boats occasionally get passed down within ownership families too — though that next generation usually still has to earn their way up, often starting as a deckhand, working through the ranks, learning the boat from the inside out before they ever get to call themselves captain, let alone own anything. Nothing about this industry is handed to anyone without time put in.
The knowledge transfer is even more interesting than the ownership question. How do you read a kelp paddy? How do you teach a 10-year-old to fly-line a sardine without snapping it off? How do you know when a bite's about to die and it's time to move? None of that lives in a book. It gets handed down at the rail, in the galley, on the dock at 4am loading bait. From captains to deckhands. From deckhands to passengers. From older anglers to newer ones who happen to draw the slot next to them.
Day at the Docks in San Diego every spring is one of the clearest visual proofs of all this. Walk through that crowd and you'll see families that have been booking the same boats for decades. Grandfathers pointing out their old captains to their grandsons. Fathers showing daughters how the gaff works. The whole community renewing itself every season.
You don't see that at most modern outdoor businesses. You see it in SoCal sportfishing because the relationships go back decades.
What the kid taught me
Back to the Arizona kid. What I watched over those 2.5 days wasn't just a kid learning to fish. It was a whole boat of strangers deciding to be part of his trip with him.
When he came back up from below deck, exhausted from fighting nausea, nobody hassled him about it. They just made room at the rail. When he hooked up, people shouted and encouraged him. When he landed his fish, anglers two slots down clapped him on the shoulder. His dad and uncle made a big deal of every fish — stoked for him every time — and kept fishing alongside him, available when he needed help with a knot or a bait or a tangle.
That's the actual lesson, I think. Not the fishing. The patience. The being-there. The showing-up to do something together that takes time and produces moments you can't engineer.
Which brings me back to my dad. He's 74 now. We're talking about doing another Mt. Tallac trip — me and him, the same trail he took me on when I was 10, if he can swing the climb. That conversation has been on my mind a lot this Father's Day.
He didn't take me fishing. He took me up a mountain. Same thing, in the end.
The point of this post
Father's Day is a marketing holiday in a lot of ways — but it's also a real moment to think about what you're handing down and what's been handed to you.
If you have a dad who's still around, take him fishing. Or hiking. Or whatever your version is. If you have a kid, take them. If you don't have either but there's a young angler in your life who could use someone to show them the ropes — be that person.
You don't need to be the perfect dad-who-fishes-every-weekend. You don't need to have grown up with a perfect fishing legacy yourself. You just need to show up, hand someone a rod, and be patient while they figure it out.
The fish are a bonus. The being there is the point.
If you're planning a trip with a parent, kid, or first-time angler, findyournextcatch.com/trips lists every available SoCal sportfishing trip across 21 landings. Filter by half-day or 3/4-day for the most beginner-friendly options.
Happy Father's Day to all the dads, uncles, grandfathers, mentors, and weird family friends who put a rod in someone's hand for the first time.
Tight lines.
Keith Leonard is the founder of Find Your Next Catch. He fishes out of SoCal, hikes with his dad when he can, and occasionally still gets out on the water with his daughter.