Hooking Children on Something Other Than Electronics

Music played during the National Night Out at Wolfe Park Tuesday evening and children's laughter could be heard at the dunk tank and moon bounces, but others engaged in a quieter pursuit on the lower baseball field.

A boy stood next to home plate, reared back and swung his fishing pole forward, casting his line toward an assortment of plastic fish on the pitcher's mound.

"If you watch a fishing show, the fisherman wants the line to go to the spot where you know there's a fish to catch," said Jim Hawkes, an instructor for Connecticut Aquatics Resources Education (CARE), a DEEP Inland Fisheries Division program.

As another boy started to practice directional casting, Hawkes said, "We teach safety too. See how he's looking both ways first?"

A few feet away, David Connelly, a CARE instructor, taught a group of boys and girls to fish in the Wolfe Park pond.

"You take the kids fishing and see the look on their faces  when they catch their first fish ..." Connelly said of what he enjoys most about teaching in the free DEEP program.

Monroe Park Ranger David Solek invited CARE to participate in the National Night Out.

"I thought, 'Why not get kids hooked on something other than electronics?'" Solek recalled.

Justin Wiggins, a fisheries biologist with the DEEP, showed families a display of fish and taught how to identify them and a little bit about ecology on the upper field, before inviting them down to the pond to fish.

Solek said CARE teaches children how to care for fish, to catch and release, and how to prepare fish properly when they take a catch home to eat.

Connelly smiles when remembering a girl who excelled in the classroom during a CARE course, then used money from her First Communion to buy a fishing pole.

He said, "A month later, her mother called me and said, 'You don't realize how much you changed my daughter's life. She's out every day fishing with her grandfather.'"