Jackson’s blog

Jackson Downey Kelly Griffin-Brown Senior Project  May 23, 2023                 Florida Fun During our time in Boca Raton, Florida we learned a year's worth of job and fishing experience within fourteen days. Our mentor Jordan was a construction worker, who turned into a self-employed IT business creator. Now Jordan owns his own prestige fishing charter business down in Boca Raton. Jordan has shown us all the nitty gritty fishing techniques while teaching us the essentials for owning, running, and upgrading a home.  My personal favorite part of the whole trip is the fishing trips that Jordan took us on. Normally Jordan would charge $750 for five hours of fishing on his charter. He was nice enough to take us fishing on his boat five days out of the fourteen. To fish Jordan uses a technique called slow-pitched jigging. This technique is extremely common in South America where big tuna are prevalent in deep waters. The tuna we looked for is called blackfin tuna. These tun

 Today was a long and fun day. I went fishing with my friend in Marblehead, we were targeting striped bass. It is early in the season but we figured that we could get a head start on some spots. We went earlier in the day to buy bass lures, and we just went along all the rocks outside of the harbor to try and find some bass. We had a decent day, catching 2 fish which is pretty good for this time of the year.  The bass are good eating but the new regulations are between 28 and 31 inches. That is a small slot for keeping fish. It used to be anything over 28 inches, so I hope the bass population is not decreasing. It is very possible though due to everyone fishing for them all the time. We started fishing at 11 and ended at 4. Hours today: 5 Total hours: 77

                    Week 2 Reflection This week we learned a lot of different techniques for fishing and for construction. Jordan was less hands-on this week and more informative. He taught us how to dissect all the rods, clean them and repair them. While also teaching us how to do plumbing repair, and how to fix drywall. I really enjoyed this week, Jordan was thinking outside the box and has us doing a lot of great things.  On the fishing side this week it was rough. The actual fishing was not great. The conditions for boating were not good which made the fishing bad. We had two long days this week that were specifically for fishing. We went out and started looking for tuna both days, but had no luck. Jordan said to us that the dark blue spots in the water where the tuna hangout is way too deep. They were sitting in about 1000 feet of water, that's where the tuna will not go. If they do it is super deep and is extremely hard to leverage 1000 feet of water and locate them

 We had to catch an early flight back, so day 11 was our last day. Total hours: 71 and some change

 Today was a long slow day. We woke up at 7am to go over to Jordan. We got over there and immediately got to the dock to go fishing. Another day looking for blackfin tuna, we decided to slow-pitch jig again as well. Jordan prefers this technique the most, he believes it is the most effective at this time of the season. The tuna love to hang out in the deep blue water, it is around 600 feet deep where they were. But unfortunately, we did not have any luck today. We tried to go in more shallow water and look for wahoo but did not have any luck with that either. We headed back after a short day of fishing and ended up cleaning jordans boat from 1 to 2. Hours today: 6 Total: 71

 Day 10, almost there. Today we woke up at 8:30 and headed to Jordans, we went straight from Jordans to the fishing dock, and we had bags full of frozen Bonita. We got the fillet table and started to thaw out all of the frozen fish; it smelt so bad. The task was to cut up all of the Bonita into strips that Jordan can use for bait. He wanted us to cut them into triangles almost, to make them aerodynamic. This was very difficult. Then he didn't want too much meat on top of it because it would all tear up in the water. The end goal was to have perfect slick triangular, spear head looking strips. This was all we did today, just sharpen our knife skills and see a bunch of cool fish. We left around 12:30. Hours Today: 3.5 hours Total: 65 hours