Twelve-year-old Natalie Bacchus cast her line like a fly-fishing pro into a freshly stocked section of the C&O Canal. But that didn’t mean she wanted to touch the one-pound catfish she reeled in. “It’s exciting when you catch one,” Bacchus said as she let Matt Babbitt, school-based educator with the Living Classrooms Foundation, wriggle the hook from her fish’s mouth to release it.
Bacchus was fishing this stretch of the canal near The Boathouse at Fletcher’s Cove in Washington, DC, as part of an annual Family & Youth Casting Call, hosted by the District Department of the Environment’s Aquatic Resources Education program along with several nonprofit and corporate sponsors.
Bacchus, a seventh grade student at Hart Middle School in DC, had an advantage over some of the other students that cycled through the fishing event that day. She’s been participating this year in a Living Classrooms program that teaches kids to fly fish during field trips throughout the watershed.
“There’s sort of a generation that never learned to fish,” said Teresa Rodriguez, chief of the Wildlife Management Branch of DDOE’s Fisheries and Wildlife Division. At this event, “they’re learning about the importance of kids being out in nature.”
The event, in its eighth year, brought more than 200 local, mostly middle school students out to the water on June 13 — and got them back onto the buses just before an afternoon thunderstorm rolled in. About 150 families participated in a similar event the next day that taught parents and children alike about fishing and water environments.
When they weren’t fishing, students cycled through other stations near the cove that taught them about cultural fish traditions and water ecology. They used a small fish made of stone to make imprints of fish with paint on paper, a method Rodriguez explained was used before photography to record the size and shape of catches.
At one station, kids crowded around a bucket of ice for a closer look at one of the Chesapeake Bay’s slipperiest creatures: the invasive snakehead. The boldest students reached out to touch the snaggle-toothed fish, which, they quickly proclaimed, was “slimy” and “gross.”
They peppered Damien Ossi, a DDOE wildlife biologist, with questions as he explained that the slimy exterior is the snakehead’s protective covering and how the fish arrived in these waters.
“We brought them over from Asia into ponds to eat, but then they escaped and swam into this river, the Potomac,” Ossi said, pointing to the river behind them.
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