1. List the contact name, phone number, and organization of the person with whom you volunteered.
- Contact Name: Delbert Nuñez
- Phone Number: 626-392-7803
- Organization: California Department of Fish and Game
- Delbert has over 40 years of experience with Sport Fishing.
- He has been a licensed angler for over 30 years.
- He is currently involved with the California Department of Fish and Game.
3. List three questions for further exploration now that you've completed your summer hours.
- How can I become the best Sport Fisherman I can possibly be?
- How many different style can you sport fish?
- Does sport fishing help increase the population of fish species?
4. What is the most important thing you gained from this experience? Why?
- When I first came into this topic, I had just seen fishing as a hobby that was designed basically around catching fish and throwing them back, then repeating the process. But, as my summer went on, and as I continued to learn about Sport Fishing with my mentor, it started to become more of a spiritual connection instead of a hobby. I started to realize that there was more to fishing than just trying to catch a fish, in fact, catching a fish was just a bonus. This helped me become an even better fisherman because I started to feel a connection with water and the living beasts that rule the underwater world which made me truly respect them. Whenever I was around or in the water, I was in their territory and had to respect them for it, so I had to be even smarter than they really were and trick them into a hard fighting battle where I could net and release them, or they could snap the line and break my heart. But at the end of the day, you'll learn from your mistakes, even the best fisherman in the world learn new things every time they go fishing, but it's how you put these new answers into effect. So in the end, I learned how to truly connect with the sport of fishing which made me ten times a better angler.
5. What is your senior project topic going to be? How did mentorship help you make your decision? Please explain.
- My senior topic is going to be "Sport Fishing"
- My father who is my mentor helped me to decide to pick this topic as my senior project topic because ever since I was a child, he always influenced me by taking me fishing and teaching me the ways of fishing. But over this summer, we really dug deep into sport fishing, and he told me to pick something that I really want to know and connect with because I'm going to have to spend my entire senior year on that topic. So, I really thought about it and I wasn't one hundred percent sure that I wanted it to be sport fishing, but one morning my father spoke with me and really helped me connect with sport fishing, suddenly this world of colors and things I've never seen nor felt before just hit me and that was when I knew that I really wanted to do my senior topic on Sport Fishing.
