Anyone driving on Stockdale Highway and Buena Vista on Feb. 28 undoubtedly caught a glimpse of the annual Sheriff’s Activities League fishing derby. The event took place between 7 a.m. and noon at Riverwalk Park in Northwest Bakersfield. The SAL has been putting on the fishing event for five years now, but this year is their fourth year at the Riverwalk lake.????
“We started this in 2004 at Mirror Lake in Hart Park, but it was hard because the lake was so small, so the next year we moved out to Riverwalk, and we’ve been out here ever since,” explains SAL program director and deputy Derek Brannan, who started the derby. “I was sitting around one day and I thought that Lake Isabella is this huge thing that we can do something with so I came up with the idea of a fishing contest to raise money for the program.”
Anyone can sign up to compete based on their age bracket. There’s the children’s divisions as well as the teen divisions, the child with an adult division and the adult division.
Everyone gets a colored wristband that places them at a certain place around the lake where they have 10 minutes to catch fish and then they move to another spot. The person with the heaviest fish in each competing division wins a trophy. In addition to this, people bought raffle tickets to win children’s bicycles, among other things.
According to Brannan, the event is not just about raising money for the SAL program, it is also about giving kids a full learning experience.
SAL is a non-profit organization that reaches out to mainly inner-city kids between 8 and 18 that have difficulty behavior-wise in school. SAL has branches in Lamont, Kern Valley, Wasco and East Bakersfield. They do various activities with the kids and encourage them positively.
“Our goal is to provide activities and sports through cops mentoring kids,” says Brannan. The program parallels that of the PAL (Police Activities League) organization.
April Brannan, also a SAL program director and Deputy Brannan’s wife, explains what the event was really about. “We come out the night before and kind of baby-sit the lake and we camped out with all of our kids; the ones from the program and our very own. We are really hands-on with the kids. They learn how to fish and camp, but they also have a lot of fun.”
Although Deputy Martin Barron, who is the program director for the Wasco SAL branch, was participating for the first time this year, he knew it was a great event that his SAL kids would love.
“The event is important because it allows the kids to intermingle with other SAL kids,” Barron said. “It gives them goals, it gives me a chance to spend more time with them and most importantly everyone has fun.”
This year local radio station, KUZZ came out and supported the event as well as the county fire department.