Monday, July 11, 2016

Enjoying Sea Life

What a first week!

On Monday (07/08/2016) I filleted my first fish on the spot at work without any prior training! You're probably thinking "Wait Raymond, how is that even possible?" Well, I grew up watching a countless amount of fishing videos over the years with occasional fish prepping scenes and the fact that I grew up watching my dad prep fish in our family kitchen, just might offer a clue as to how I even achieved such a feat. Shortly after that I encouraged one of my JPA's Amanda to fillet her first fish (ever) too! We both did a great job for our first time. Sorry ladies and gents, I don't have any pictures of our final product, but boy did we catch some large crabs this week with our chopped mackerel!

Throughout the week we caught various sized crabs; the most identifiable species of crab we caught was the spider crab. You guys should have seen the faces of our harbor explorers (the kids that we teach fishing and crabbing to) when we pulled out one of the largest spider crabs I have ever seen in person! With it's legs straightened out, it easily had a length of a foot and a half!
 

We later found out that knew that she was barely even half her potential maximum size! The harbor explorers and I had a hard time letting this girl go, but we figured that it would be even cooler to re-catch her when she spans over two or three feet!



What I love most about this program is the assortment of kids with different tolerances to touching fish and crabs! I'm glad that I can show on almost a daily basis that if you keep an open mind, the fish and crabs are pretty awesome! Captured in these next photos you can get a sense of the kids opening up to the idea that sea life is cool! They are definitely embracing the fish (literally)!


The Friday of this week was nothing short of exciting and fun! Thanks to John Hancock, we got an amazing speech from J. Cross! He was full of energy and if you ever get the delight of experiencing the a "J. Cross Motivational speech" you will understand the depth of my words when I say he did not lose my undivided attention for even a split second. He got pumped before the cross fit workouts began. It was at that point that I knew I was going to be as phenomenal and earn a "SWAG BAG."


Brought to you by Raymond Chai!


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