Back to the Children's Museum!

Well, I was back at Children's this week! Although it was an eventful week. We had got a ton of people that wanted to fish throughout the week. We even got a striped bass! The story behind catching it is the crazy part of it.

The striped bass was caught, not by an adult, not by our staff, but by a 9 year old Japanese girl. How crazy is that? It was a 16-inch bass, so not legal to keep, but still cool. But that's not the end of that part of the story! When I asked them if they wanted to try fishing, at first it was only the boy, but after two tries, the girl wanted to as well. I tell you, when it hit the bottom, everyone thought it had gotten snagged on seaweed or a rock, which is not uncommon, but no, it was bent and perfectly straight without pulling on it. A fish had grabbed the bait as soon as it was put into the water. So, we reeled it in as close to the dock as possible, without pulling it out of the water because the tide was too far out. At first, we tried to get it into a bucket so that we didn't risk the line snapping, but after about 3 or 4 minutes of failures, I decided to just strong man pull it up. Still felt lucky because I don't know the test on the lines (how heavy something can be so the line wouldn't snap).

We made sure to let the girl hold her fish and get a picture of her. I was probably the next most lucky person there, because of them stopping and trying fishing, I had a chance to practice my Japanese! I recited my jikoshokai, which roughly translates to "self introduction" and screwed up a tiny bit. I don't know whether they were being nice, or they truly thought that I did well... It may have been the fact that I tried at all, especially when the majority that they hear is English.

Another group was at Atlantic Wharf this day, and since they were having trouble catching crabs at the beginning, we gave them some of our crabs for their touch tank. Later, after we got the fish, they came back. I was a little sad to see the fish go, especially since we had caught it at our sight, but it was nice that we got to share it with other kids!

Whoa living on a prayer,
Garrett