Tightlines 4-H Fishing Club Leaders: Bonnie Harrell, Allen Stokes

The purpose of the Tightlines 4-H Fishing Club is to learn about and have fun fishing while also learning about the environment, ecology, recycling, watersheds, renewable resources, pollution cause, and effect, etc.  Our club is also a current NJ Fish and Wildlife Hooked on Fishing, Not on Drugs curriculum club. Our members are Eddie Hoover, Alex Harrell, Josh Lamonica, Arabella AitHaddad, Rainbow McAtee, Autumn Richards, Frankie Lashley, Jack McGarr, Jacob Torres, Casey Schwert, Maya Wenger, and Amelia Worthington.
This was a relaunch of the fishing club and we’ve been building our club this year. We shared officer responsibilities through this year so everyone could try their hand at different positions and responsibilities.
During this 4 H year, we have gone kayaking and learned about boating safety. We’ve gone crabbing and learned and reviewed size limits and which ones we were allowed to keep. We learned about hand lines and crab nets and what the regulations are for commercial pots.
We’ve freshwater fished. We’ve saltwater fished from a jetty. We took a saltwater charter fishing boat for an outing in June. In August, we are going sailing on the AJ Meerwald Schooner.  We also plan to get out kayaking again before school starts and in September, we hope to get another day of crabbing in. 
We have enjoyed activities each month in the HOFNOD learning guide – what happens when there is overpopulation of a species, what happens when a town causes a stream to become polluted, what happens in the web of life when one of the parts of the web disappear, and we’ve “made” new fish species (on paper). 
We’ve learned to spool our own reels, tie our own tackle and put on our own bait.  We’ve also learned how to take our fish off the hook.  It’s been quite an exciting year for us and our members have sure learned good fishing etiquette and everyone has caught at least one fish so far. 
For our community service project, we collected items for NJ Nature and delivered two trucks of items to them in April.
We have also been working on our 4-H fountain garden for the fair and we will have activities for kids to enjoy at our booth. So, stop by and see us at the 4-H Fair.