Tricky Fish & Saving a Life

Greetings folks! I had the amazing opportunity to attend the last fishing trip of the summer with Captain Charlie and the CHV team! During this trip we snagged a couple of small fish that notoriously ate our sea worms, which we released to only be hooked once again. We ended snagging a few black sea bass and Scup. Twice I had my line break due to a fish being too large! My excitement and frustration over losing such a fish got some of the fishing club kids on board to feel the same excitement when it happened to them. On our trip back, you could see some of the staff really enjoying their last few days of summer before the fall comes around by dancing to music on the boat and hanging off the edge of the ceiling on Captain Charlies boat!

In this same week we had brought back from the office a second fish trap that looked even more superb than the first! After a few hours of letting it sit in the waters with some sliced up fish from our office's cooler, we caught a whopping number of 6 fish! We ended up using a filling a giant cooler with salt water so that we could create a mini-aquarium with the caught fish. That was definitely a highlight of this summer at Pier's Park!

This week didn't end there, we ended up saving a grasshopper as well! On my kayak was Amalia and one of the twins (it was either Jopelin or Oliver). We were browsing around the waters doing one of the kids favorite activities, cleaning the harbor by picking up trash! We stumbled upon this grasshopper that looked like it was dead, so I lifted it out of the water with my paddle and it immediately jumped back into the water! I got the kids excited and told them that we could save the grasshopper and it was during our ride back onto the dock that the grasshopper took a ride one of the twins head! When we brought it back to the tent in a plastic bag (to make sure it wouldn't frantically jump off into the water) for snack time, all the other kids crowded around in amazement! It was shortly after that when Amalia wanted to release the little guy back into the grass. However, the grasshopper didn't hop off the moment we freed him, so one of the twins had the great idea of getting the grasshopper on his hat! In the next few photos you can see that the kids took turns having the grasshopper on their hats! That day, Amalia took home the grasshopper as a pet and that's when I figured that this could have been a Disney movie!

It was during the luau that I saw Amalia again and heard from her and her mom that they built a small terrarium for the small grasshopper and fed it lettuce! It stories like these that feel unreal despite being there to witness it all happen!

Signing out,
Raymond Chai

Jeopardy!

Hey guys,
So one thing that I absolutely love about Piers Park is that Zach gives at least one lesson a day to the kids. He teaches the kids about different types of sharks, marine mammals, marine environments, boats and Donald McKay. He asks different questions, like do sharks have skin or scales? Why is the coral reef bleaching? What is the Ozone layer? What are characteristics of a mammal? At the end of the week, he does a game of Jeopardy as a way to make learning fun. This week we had 18 kids for Jeopardy so we divided ourselves into 3 groups of 6,  but there was one group of 5, one group of 6 and one group of 7. A few girls this week took notes during his lessons and so they organized themselves into a group of 6 so they would have all the notes. Paula was going to be the counselor for that group. I was originally going to be with that group but then a group of 5 boys asked me to join them. All week these boys were saying how they did not like me and now they wanted my help, so of course I joined them. Sean had taken the group of 7 until he realized his winning streak was at stake. Sean's group had won Jeopardy every week and my group came in second every single week. Once he realized that he might not win, he switched over to the group of 6 girls, abandoning the group and leaving them with Kent. My team made the mistake of picking a 300 point questions as our first question because after that we trailed the group with notes by 100 points. Neither of our groups got a questions wrong. It was coming down to the 100 point questions, which Zach had made daily triples, but no one got them wrong. Then it came to Final Jeopardy. Sean decided to rejoin the group of 7 for this. My group had 2000 points, Paula's had 2100 points, and Sean's group had 1700 points. It was a close game, and I convinced my team to bet all the points. Paula's team bet 2098 points and Sean's had bet 1699. Then came the question, which could have been about anything. Zach started saying the question. "Our government is split into 3 different branches, what are the names of the 3 branches of government?" I got a sudden flashback to 8th grade civics with Ms. Ryan, and I easily knew the answer, but we were not allowed to just give the kids the answer. One of the kids in my group, Zach, had said "I know one of them! Legislative!" Yes! He knew one out of the three. Then I asked "ok guys, so think, what is in a court?" and they all said "judges!" and I was able to lead them to say the word "Judicial" even though they could not pronounce it. The last branch would be hard to explain. So I said "Ok guys, think about the President. He is very important. Can you guys think of a word that starts with the letter E that means important?" they were stumped. I had to think of how I could get them to say "Executive". So I told them to keep thinking, and I kept giving them hints. "Ex....Exec..." and then one of the kid says "Executive?" Yes! I thought. We could win it. They told Zach our answer and I knew we got it right. However, Paula's team also got it right. They had an acronym, "Everybody Loves Jellybeans". Every week I have come so close to winning, but my kids are always disappointed. So I say to them, "Guys, we did not have any notes. They had notes and they only beat us by 200 points, that's incredible because you retained the information in your heads while they had it on paper. Be proud of yourselves for being this smart". It usually makes them feel better, but they were still disappointed because they wanted to win and get the prize. But then again the prize was just Piers Park Sailing Center bracelets.
Til Next Time,
Amanda