Restaurant owner Mary Botham stepped outside and announced she had enough work for all the kids, handing the youngsters their job assignments, including serving, table-busing and hosting.
Given a server job, Pedro was thrilled, and he wasn’t the only one; his father and a cluster of other parents standing nearby also beamed with delight.
 Kindergarten students from Taft Elementary School tour of Pillar Point Harbor on a field trip organized by El Granada resident and teacher Kim Combs that included a stop aboard the Malesa to speak with fisherman Steve Truso and look at starfish. |
No, it was a field trip from Taft Elementary School in Redwood City, bringing inner-city kindergartners from the Spanish-immersion school to the coast.
“When each of you walk through the restaurant, do it like penguins! That means hands at your sides,” said Botham, who, together with her husband, has been hosting field trips since taking on the business 29 years ago.
Maneuvering through the seafood restaurant like a line of Arctic birds, the students clearly loved it.
The seafood restaurant wasn’t the only stop for the 60 students; it was part of a larger tour of Pillar Point Harbor, showing them how seafood gets from the ocean to the dinner plate.
An El Granada native who has worked for years at Ketch Joanne’s Restaurant, teacher Kim Combs dreamed up the trip to the harbor as a way to show her class the fishing community she loves and the sea it depends on. Organizing the trip each of the last three years, Combs plans on bringing a second group of students to the harbor today.
“Being in the community we work in, it’s 99 percent Latino,” Combs explained. “The kids often don’t get the experience of seeing the beach.”
Taft Elementary is focused around Hispanic students learning solid Spanish skills before moving on to develop fluent English. Combs said the colorful harbor community gave her an excellent opportunity to teach her class some new vocabulary and have some fun.
At first, she said, the harbormaster officers were a little wary of leading a tour.
“They said ‘your students are going to speak English, right?’” Combs said. “I told them, ‘just don’t worry about it.’”
A bear of a man, harbor officer John Draper clearly was a favorite among the children. On a harbor patrol boat, the students laughed with glee as Draper showed off the watercraft’s sirens, lights and other fancy gadgets.
“Don’t fall off the boat!” Draper warned. “I don’t want to have to swim after you. It’s cold!”
Harbor officials say about 25 school field trips come and visit the Princeton docks each year, and the bulk of those tours come during the spring months. Most classes take a quick tour of the harbor, then spend most of their time at the Pillar Point Bluffs.
For their trip, the Taft students also visited another boat, a bottom trawler further down the harbor owned by fisherman Steve Truso, an old friend of Combs.
Using his fishing gear, Truso quickly caught a starfish for the children, one of the more recognizable sea creatures for them thanks to the popular SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon (in Spanish, that’s Bob Esponja Pantalones Cuadrados).
Still, the sight and feel of the rough-shelled starfish was a shock for some children.
“Those kids, they’ve never touched one before!” Truso said. “You could see the kids were terrified of a starfish!”
Truso said dealing with a school of kids (instead of schools of fish) was an absolute delight, although it did remind him of the long-term questions surrounding the harbor and its denizens.
“This could be gone in a decade. … Every one who’s fishing here is 50 years old,” Truso said. “No one from the high school plans on being a fisherman these days.”
The students also toured the Morning Star Fisheries, where they gazed wide-eyed at ice-filled bins of halibut, the most recent catch for the harbor. Combs tested her students’ vocabulary, picking up a cold halibut and pointing to get her students to call out the body parts — fins(“aletas”), sharp teeth(“dientes filosos”), mouth(“boca”).
Back at the Princeton Seafood Company, the white-aproned students were ecstatically working the restaurant and sitting down with their parents to enjoy a round of halibut fish and chips.
One young kindergartner, Felipe, was saying out loud that fish was now his favorite food.
“More than hamburgers?” a girl next to him asked.
“No, not that much,” he replied.
Pedro finished off a round of seafood with his father, who had taken the day off from work to be with his son.
“It was really nice to be here,” Efrain Omtiveros said. “This is my first time doing this with my son. … I don’t have too much time; I work seven days a week.”
Two girls were enthusiastically serving lemonade to their classmates and excitedly running with a tray of drinks from the kitchen; they just barely avoided a head-on collision with some retreating servers, thanks to the quick reflexes of a teacher’s aide.
“If they spill, we’ll clean it up,” said Botham, the restaurant owner, to reassure the other adults. “I know I’ve spilled plenty of drinks myself over the years.”
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