On Saturday, May 24, 2025, the Reel Blessed Chapter of Fishing’s Future held our 3^rd event of the year at Indian Riverside Park. This event is one of my favorites, as it is a saltwater event. We had 37 participants registered, as well as 12 volunteers signed up, so it was bound to be a great day.

I loaded the car on Friday evening, so we are ready to go and less likely to forget anything. Tania and I were up bright and early on Saturday morning and arrived at Billy Bones by 7:00 a.m., where I picked up the bait for our event. It was nice of Billy Bones to set aside 20 dozen shrimp to ensure we had enough bait for our event.

Tania needed to pick up the food from Fit Fixn’s at 10:00 am, so she headed home after we unloaded the car to ensure an on-time pick-up. We arrived at Indian Riverside Park at about 7:30 am. To start setting up. Since we were using the pavilions at the park and didn’t have to set up our canopy and tables, it took only 30 minutes to prepare for the families to arrive. FWC Officer Peters also joined us at the event. I feel it’s good to have the first interaction with law enforcement under favorable circumstances.

Since we only had 17 participants, we delayed the start time by about 10 minutes to see if more would arrive.  At 9:10 am, we opened our event with a prayer. I then introduced the Reel Blessed Chapter of Fishing’s Future and shared our mission, since this was nearly everyone’s first event with the Reel Blessed Chapter of Fishing’s Future.  Introducing all our volunteers. I then discussed our sponsors so that the families would know who was responsible for helping make this event possible at no charge to them.

Once we had finished the introductions and discussed water safety, I divided the families into groups and then sent them to their respective stations.  Because it was getting very hot and humid, we abbreviated our stations to get fishing before everyone became too hot and tired.

We spent the next hour preparing the families for their fishing expedition. We finished up all the stations around 10:00 a.m. Next, we gathered all the families and provided them with the ground rules for fishing on the pier. At this point, all the families and the volunteers went fishing.   

All the families seemed to enjoy fishing, even though the fish weren’t biting. I could tell the heat was starting to get to the families, so I told everyone we would wrap it up at 11:30. This turned out to be a good decision, as right about 11:30 a.m., all the food was set up for lunch.

Overall, the fishing was slow. We only caught a handful of fish, mostly snapper, but we also had some extraordinary catches. One of the younger boys, who was autistic, landed a decent-sized blue runner on light tackle. By the time the fishing was over, I was sad that most of the families had not caught anything, but they were all good sports and still had a great time.

Once we were all off the dock and back at the pavilions, I gathered the families to bless our meal. As with the other events, I asked if anyone would like to bless the meal. Carter, one of the boys, raised his hand and wanted to pray over the food! It’s great seeing the little ones get involved and be willing to pray before a crowd.

Fit Fixn’s provided us with an excellent and healthy meal. We had a salad, chicken, rice, and black bean vegetable melody. This was the third year we used Fit Fixin’s, and it was another big hit.

After lunch, we did a trash pick-up. We made it a little competition, and the top kid would get a prize. The kids were so excited to go pick up the trash. We picked up a lot of trash, and the winner received a Reel Blessed hat as well as a tackle bag. The rest of the kids got a hat.  We were happy to see the kids excited about cleaning up the environment.

We concluded our event in the same manner as we have all our other events. We asked the kids to thank the parent or guardian who brought them to the event, tell them they love them, and hug them. This is one of our favorite parts of the events. We even had a mother say she doesn’t hear that from her daughter often!

All in all, our event was a success, and we had many happy families. We would like to personally thank all our volunteers and sponsors, without whom we would not be able to serve our community. We are grateful to partner with all of you!

If you have any questions about our events, would like to volunteer, or feel led to support our mission financially, we’d love to hear from you! Your involvement helps us continue strengthening families and sharing unforgettable experiences through fishing. To learn more about what we do, click the Reel Blessed link to read about past events. If you’d like to reach out, just click the Contact button — and if you’d like to donate, simply click the Donate button and in the notes write Reel Blessed so the funds can come directly to us. Thank you for being a part of the Reel Blessed family!