During this time of year, we have summer camp. We take up to 24 kids per week for several weeks during the summer. We focus on F.U.N. (Fishing, Understanding and Nurturing). We get the kids out on a boat with a licensed and insured Coast Guard certified Captain six hours a day for five days, Monday through Friday. This is a great way for kids to get hands on learning and experience and have a blast fishing!
One of our main goals at Ana Banana Kids Fishing Camp is to keep our campers busy. If a kid dosen’t get a bite in 15 minutes or more, they get impatient and start losing interest. This time of year, Mother Nature helps us keep the kids busy. We like to target a multi species list of fish. Our record is 23 species of fish in a single camp week. We’ll catch snook, snapper, Spanish mackerel, sea bass, sea trout, shark, sheepshead, black drum, flounder, kingfish, tarpon, redfish, ladyfish, grunts, catfish, jacks, cobia, triple tail, bluefish, blue runners and many others. For example, we may anchor at the Sky Way Bridge and have two campers flowing out cut thread fins in our chum line for tarpon, shark and cobia. At the same time, on the port side of the boat, we’ll have a couple kids bottom fishing with live shrimp for snapper, grouper, sea bass, grunts and sheepshead. On the starboard side of the boat, we’ll have a couple kids casting free lined green backs towards the bridge to hook tarpon, Spanish mackerel, or kingfish. We’ll rotate the kids around to each station so they all get a chance to target different fish using different techniques at a single anchorage. The captain and first mate stay busy too, tying hooks/leader, baiting hooks, chumming, landing and taking fish off the hooks and answering questions, a lot of questions, while all the time teaching, having fun, understanding, and nurturing. We also teach water safety, rules of the sea, boating/fishing ethics, conservation, and preservation of our natural resources, how to read GPS, bottom finders and many other lessons.
Ana Banana Fishing Company performed a fishing clinic at the Ruskin Elks Lodge for a local fishing club last year. Most of the audience were retired seniors who love to fish and have the time and money to do it. One of the subjects we presented to the group was information on our kid’s summer fishing camp. After discussing our camp information, a senior fellow in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, “would you consider an adult kid’s fishing camp?” I thought about it for a second and said yes. By the end of the clinic this fellow recruited five club members to team up with him to book a week-long adult kids fishing camp with us. We had the six club members at the camp for a week and put them through the same schedule and agenda as the kid’s camp. The adults loved the experience and caught a lot of fish. Several in the group have boats and live on the water– they were there to learn more about fishing in the bay and where to go. We loved our adult kids, one neat thing was, that these adults got a chance to be kids again for a week. We’ve done several adult groups since then and it’s always a 100% success.
Be safe and ethical, see ya’ll out there!