Natural history: Turtle-ing?

Hey guys! I don't know how your quarantine is going, but I am ready to lose my mind stuck at home. Homeschooling a child is no joke, but one hobby we have found to keep us both busy and out of the house a little bit is fishing. In my last natural history post I mentioned we were getting a minnow trap..what a dud..didn't catch a single herp. Anyways, I took my daughter fishing at the pond in our neighborhood a few days ago. My daughter had a piece of hot dog on as bait, casted, set the rod on the grass and ran off, cause that's what kids do. I look up and a huge turtle is on the end of her line so I grab it and start trying to bring it in, but it just took the hot dog and swam away as fast as possible. About 10 minutes go by I have a worm for bait and I think I have a big fish, but nope, another turtle! This one I managed to bring up to the grass and got a hold of it for some pictures.

Here is the adorable Yellow-Bellied Slider (Trachemys Scripta)

The carapace was pretty algae covered, but it was pretty distinguishable by it's yellow plastron with dark blotches on the underside edges. Additionally, you can see the yellow head blotches and narrow stripes on it's front legs. All the pictures of the rear side came out blurry, so unfortunately a cute turtle butt is not included in this post. You may be able to tell the large size of the turtle just by comparison to my hands holding it and let me tell you, it was pretty darn heavy too. It was very timid, as I assume most wild turtles are and he pretty much remained tucked away into his shell unless we stayed very still and then he seemed a little bit curious. As far as the gender goes, I'm not quite sure due to blurry tail end photos and inexperience, but nonetheless I was excited to see such a beautiful herp.

Side note: the hook never punctured the turtle's beak and it was happily returned into the pond

My daughter sent it off with a forget me not flower