WaterNotes

Kids love to tell fish tales.  Throughout my time as an instructor I’ve heard the following: “a sea snake just jumped up and bit me!”, “a manatee was eating a fish in the water!”, “I called the dolphins over to me!”, “we almost caught a huge stingray!”, ”I tripped over a log and that’s why I just had to start swimming!”.  Younger kids often embellish more than older kids, but not always.

This past Friday I was out in the Banana River with students who proclaimed they had found a wallet with a police badge in it.  To which I replied: “Oh yeah?  Well any trash you find just put it in the bucket and get back to seining guys.”  They yelled back, “No really, its a police badge!”  One student started waving said item around in the air like a crazy person attempting to swat imaginary flies.  To which I replied: “No really I think you should get back to work; you have ten minutes left!”

When the students returned to our “base camp” area to identify their catch I had a very rude awakening.  They actually did find a police badge and wallet in the water!  A barage of questions soon followed: “Miss Sarah do you think this guy is dead?”  “Is his body floating around in the water?”  “Is this badge real?”  “Can I keep it?”

The can-I-keep-it was rather surprising.  Apparently kids these days watch too many horror movies but not enough CSI to know that impersonating a police officer would be a really bad idea.  Hmm.

A quick phone call to the local station revealed that the officer in question had been robbed a few weeks prior and would be very happy to have his original badge back.  Truly you simply can’t aniticipate what a seine net will reveal from the edges of the lagoon.  The real question is, of course, is a discarded wallet marine debris?