TGI Friday Fun at McDonough!

Vinh, Jazeel, and Andy with our lobsters!

Friday at McDonough Sailing Center was a blast! We started the afternoon off by checking our lobster traps out in Pleasure Bay.  Everyday, one of the McDonough sailing instructors takes us to the traps in their trusty motor boat. Naturally, the campers fight over who gets to go on the adventure of pulling the heavy traps onto the boat. We chose two campers to come aboard and zipped out into the bay. To our surprise, in addition to the three huge lobsters we caught, we spotted a juvenile Bergall (otherwise known as a Cunner) flopping around! We quickly filled up the bail bucket with sea water and put the Bergall in. When we got back to camp everyone was incredibly excited to see what was retrieved from the traps. We had three brave campers pick up the lobsters and bring them over to the floating crate, then asked one of the kids to bring the bucket with the Bergall to our touch tank. The kids were overjoyed to see our first fish of the summer! I pulled out the guide book and asked a few of the campers if they could use it to identify our catch. After flipping through page after page, they finally found the Bergall. It was great to see the kids get so interested in the little fish- everyone wanted to touch it and couldn't wait to show all of their friends around the sailing center.

The campers using a guide book to identify the fish

Josie with our Bergall

Later on in the afternoon I took a few of the campers out on a beach walk to see what we could find. It was low tide, and the kids were begging me to take them so they could look under the exposed rocks for Asian Shore Crabs. As expected, we found plenty of crabs and jellies, but my favorite findings were spotted on a natural jetty near the causeway bridges. As we gently stepped through the cold water over the broken shells, one girl spotted something reflecting in the light. I reached in to pick it up and pulled up a huge piece of sea glass. This wasn't just any piece of sea glass, it was an entire bottom of a bottle marked "Chicago". The girls thought it was very cool that a bottle from Chicago made it over to Boston waters! Next, I spotted two large shells in the water- one oyster and one clam. They were definitely very old creatures when they died because their shells were covered in craters and looked very rugged. We then made our way over the beach back to the camp to show off our findings and check in on our lobsters and baby Bergall!

Me and the girls with our sea glass and awesome shells!

-Kelly Randall-