Fishing and Crabbing at Children's

The first full week of my Save the Harbor experience was spent at the Children's Museum. After hearing this was my site for the week I was immediately flooded with memories, due to the fact that my favorite place as a child was the Boston Children's Museum. I found it almost ironic that a place where I spent so much time being supervised and getting taught, I was now the supervisor and the teacher. I was informed that we would be running a fishing and crabbing station, and I was pretty content with that because I enjoyed fishing myself and knew the in's and out's of fishing. I was confident in my ability to teach the children how to fish and was even somewhat excited to fish myself. Throughout the week their was not much luck catching any fish, even though plenty of children thought the lure was a live fish itself. 

Though the fish weren't biting, the crabs certainly were. The first day we managed to pull up 80 crabs from the fishing net, and the children were even more excited about the catch then we were. On almost every occasion, the children were excited and curious upon laying eyes on the crab. Some were scared, and some were so eager they almost were pinched. In both situations I feel as if they enjoyed looking and exploring the crabs themselves.

The abundance of crabs draws attention 

One interaction particularly stood out to me, and that was with a boy who looked about 7 or 8 years old. His name was Maurice, and not only did he stay at the station for about an hour, he asked the most intriguing questions, some of which I did not know were capable for a kid of his age. For example he asked me "are the crabs this particular color because they need to blend into the rock so no one hurts them?". After hearing that I thought to myself how great of a question that was, and how I did not even know the answer. The intelligent questions came right after another and at one point I was tempted to ask his mother how he was so smart for such a young age.

Rods are set to begin the day 

Though Maurice stood out in my mind, the time of being at the Boston Children's Museum was one that officially introduced me into the Save the Harbor Save the Bay experience. From this, I now have a basis of what the organization is all about and hope to use that knowledge going forward.