A day on the water with a middle school fishing club

On Nov. 14, I spent the day with my son Roger’s middle school fishing club. Roger has been a science teacher ever since he graduated from Old Dominium University in Norfolk, Va. First, in Virginia Beach, where he set up fishing trips on the head boats from Lynnhaven Inlet. Those were the boats he worked on while he was going to college. After he graduated, he received his 100-ton masters license and began running those boats.

I was surprised at the number of kids he had in the fishing club at the Virginia Beach school, and while I never went on one of their fishing trips, I heard plenty of stories about what they caught. I figured the kids looked at the adventure as a great way to spend a day on the water, which was better than a day in the classroom.

After Roger followed his wife’s big work promotion and moved to New Jersey, he soon found a job teaching science. He also worked as a mate on the Golden Eagle, a head boat out of Brelle, and this was a great way to spend the summer.  

One of the more interesting things was his use of an electric filet knife. It seems the mates there were still using handheld knives to clean the customers’ fish. Roger broke out his electric filet knife, plugged it in and walked right through those blues in record time.

After he had established himself as a science teacher, he brought up the subject of a fishing club like he had in Virginia Beach. He must have done a good selling job because the powers that be approved the idea and he has led the club ever since.

The trip I went on left the dock at 6:30 a.m., and believe it or not, 32 middle school students were there on time and ready to go.

We cleared Shark River Inlet and headed north until we were in an area with hundreds of private boats along with a good half dozen or more big head boats like the Golden Eagle. There were birds diving on bait here and there and, of course, boats running there and here trying to chase them down. 

I must admit I was surprised that the young folks worked hard at fishing. The stripers were feeding on sand eels, and the anglers, both the students and all the other fishermen, were using AVA jigs with a tube tail. I brought along two rods and reels, but no metal jigs. It was just as well, since the rail was pretty crowded and I was a guest so I didn’t want to crowd out a paying customer.

In spite of all the surface activity, the catching was pretty slow. There were more spiny dog sharks than stripers caught, and of the stripers caught, it looked to me like two out of three were either to too big or too small.

Finally, one of the smallest of the young ladies, Gianna Pupo, hooked up a striper. This fish was determined to get off and Gianna fought it as hard as possible. However, due to her small stature, she was at a disadvantage, but her dad, who was one of the chaperones, picked her up – rod, reel, fish and all – and carried her above the other fishermen toward the bow while she kept cranking the fish toward the boat. Once she had the striper close enough to the side of the boat, the mate was able to put it in the long-handled net and lift it aboard. A quick measurement showed it was in the 28- to 31-inch slot so into the cooler it went. That was one of the five keepers that the 32 students were able to land.

I must tell you how impressed I was at how well behaved the students were. You put 32 middle school kids on a boat from 6:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. with not exactly the hottest fishing in the world and you would think they would come up with all sorts of mischief to get into. They did not. Both the boys and girls did a lot of fishing. Working an AVA jig is not like bait fishing where you can just bait up and put the rod in a holder. You must constantly keep the jig moving up and down to imitate a sand eel going in and out of the sand bottom.

Not every kid fished every second of the day. Some took time to have lunch, take naps and just chill out for a while. None of them did anything that could be called disruptive or in any way out of the ordinary. 

I don’t know if any of the schools in Sussex County or in Delaware have fishing or hunting clubs, but I think both would be good ideas.