By Evelyn Bonilla

 

Spending time with your father can lead to a lot of things such as man talk, getting together for a sports event or maybe just creating special times, but for the son of Bruce Dillin, owner of Dillin Tires of Bayonne, it can only mean one thing: it’s time for adventure.  In a scene that looked like an episode from Jeremy Wade’s cable TV show “River Monsters” Dillin and his son Christian captured their own real-life “river monsters”. On an excursion twenty miles southeast of Palestine, Texas, on a stretch of the Trinity River; father and son set out on an adventure that would bring about amazing results.

 Skilled in the art of bowfishing the Dillin duo combed the river in search of gar fish known as “river monsters”, these rare species of fish are known to inhabit the Trinity River, a 710 mile–long  river that flows within the state of Texas toward the Gulf of Mexico. Many fishermen come from all across the U.S. to see what this amazing river has to offer.

 Bowfishing requires a lot of skill and extreme concentration, but for the Dillin’s the thrill of the hunt wins overall. Bruce Dillin’s catch was an amazing “needlenose gar” equipped with a long snout and a narrow beak which contains many large teeth, its long body shaped like a cylinder and covered with diamond shaped scales. Dillin’s son Christian captured a “pointy tooth, alligator gar,” a fish with a long snout, many teeth and a bony head like an alligator.

 “I’ve been taking my son fishing since he’s five years old and he has been with me on many extreme adventures,” Bruce Dillin says. It was great when we brought the line up and saw what we had caught.”

 Bruce and Christian team up for lots of extreme adventures which consist of mountain biking, snowshoeing and bowfishing. Like his dad, Christian is always up for an adventure, especially scouting for these rare river monsters.

 “Bowfishing is really exciting,” Christian says. “I felt really great when I pulled up the line and saw what I had caught. It feels really good having adventures with my dad; It’s good to try different things.”

 For Bruce, it’s the thrill of the hunt; when it comes to bowfishing, so when asked what advice he had for amateur bowfishers, he replied, “It’s important to have good equipment and to make sure you follow the rules. I’m all for having as much fun as you can without hurting anybody. I encourage people to go out there and find what it is that makes them happy.”

 As Christian Dillin looks back at all he and his father have accomplished, he hopes that he will continue to share these extreme adventures with his dad and to create some new ones of his own, he explains “I like these adventures, and I hope to continue to do the same kind of things that my dad and I do, and hopefully do the same when I get older.”