The Harbor Illumination Festival

So Saturday Me, Jaden, Garrett, Zack, and Briana went to the Harbor Illumination Festival all the way in Hull, Massachusetts. Once again I came a bit too early, we were supposed to be there at 3:30 PM and I came at 3 o'clock. But hey it's good to be early right? So after getting all the supplies ready we all got in the car and set on a journey to the festival. I say journey because the ride took about a good hour to get there, but when're finally got to the place we got all our fish printing supplies out and got ready. First we put up the table that we would use of fish printing, then got some plastic to put over the table to make sure the table doesn't get fishy nor smell to much like such. We ended up making a lot of printing paper, about twenty-five papers in all I believe, but we really did not use that much of it, in all we used six out of the twenty-five papers. But while we were waiting for new people to come by and try out fish painting, there was a band playing the whole time so we never were bored just standing around doing nothing. But the three hours that we were there, at least for me, were great. I enjoyed learning how to fish print, because believe it or not before Saturday I didn't even know that fish printing was a thing!

Our little set up for Fish Printing!

Maybe I'll learn some new things here...
~Eric Joseph

Never a Dull Moment

A participant doing something he has never done before,
hold a shrimp he caught himself!

It's only been a week, but I can already tell that there will never be a dull moment working with Save the Harbor. Whether it be efforts to rescue a bucket that was dropped in the channel outside the Childrens Museum or finding a jellyfish there another day. Whether it be showing off a horseshoe crab to kids who had never seen a live one (Side note: Did you know they have ten eyes scattered around their shell?) or having to make up games under the pavilion at Blacks Creek due to an impending thunderstorm. While I wake up each day having a rough estimate of how my day is going to look, by the time I get home each day, I can look back and realize that something out of the ordinary happened each day.
My favorite question to ask the kids I find myself working with is, "Have you ever done [insert experience here] before?" Quite often, the answer is no. Many children have never caught crabs or hermit crabs, or if they have, never quite at the volume they have at Blacks Creek. One kid in particular stands out to me, with a comment he made outside the Children's Museum. He was watching the line of people with their fishing rods, and exclaimed, "I can't believe fishing is real!" I think his excitement at gaining this new piece of information, that fishing is an activity he can get involved with, speaks wonders for the importance of our programming. We give these children a chance to experience something they may never otherwise get the chance to. Many of the children at Blacks Creek have never been there before, and they are so enamored with the thought that they can just explore for crabs and minnows for an hour. I can't even count the number of kids, and adults, who are trying fishing for the first time. You can't want to protect something unless you know what it is you want to protect. I imagine throughout this summer, we will give many individuals a reason to protect their harbor.

Seize the day!

Zach