Brooklyn Fishing Derby

When and Where

When: September 12, 2026
Timeline: 10:00 am — 3:00 pm

Location: Prospect Park: Lake Shore

The Brooklyn Fishing Derby is a one-day, catch-and-release fishing competition on Prospect Park Lake, run by the Brooklyn borough of Greater New York Councils and open to Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA youth. Registration is $10 per scout.

The single most useful thing to know about it: you do not need a fishing rod. Scouts who arrive without one make their own at the lake on arrival. That removes the reason most Brooklyn families never try this — nobody owns tackle, and nobody wants to buy a rod to find out whether their kid likes fishing.

This is not a Troop 23 event. The troop does not organize transportation, take a roster or collect the fee. Families register directly with the council and travel on their own, and we put the page up because it is a genuinely good morning and because scouts can take real merit badge work out of it. Registration closes at 8:00 pm the evening before, so this is not a Saturday-morning decision.

🎣 Register for the Brooklyn Fishing Derby · questions to Anthony Seale, the council's event contact, at [email protected]

How the Day Runs

Five hours on the shore, with the fishing itself stopping half an hour before the end.

Three medals are awarded this year, and the categories are worth reading before you decide the day is only for experienced anglers:

• 🐟 Longest fish
• 🐠 Tiniest fish
• 🎣 Most fish caught

Each is awarded twice — once for Cub Scouts overall and once for Scouts BSA overall. A medal for the tiniest fish is not a joke category: Prospect Lake holds bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish, which are the easiest thing in the water for a beginner to hook — so a first-time eight-year-old has a real shot at a medal on their first morning holding a rod.

The council's own flyer is below — the thing to forward to another family.

What Is Actually in the Lake

Prospect Lake is a 48-acre freshwater lake at the southern end of Prospect Park, and it is the only freshwater fishing spot NYC Parks lists in Brooklyn. Every other Brooklyn location on their list — the piers at Bay Ridge, Coney Island Creek, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Red Hook, Greenpoint — is salt water.

According to NYC Parks, the lake holds largemouth bass, bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish, black crappie and yellow perch. The bass are what the lake is known for and what will win the longest-fish medal; the sunfish are what a beginner will actually catch, and there are a lot of them.

Knowing those five names before you go is worth more than it sounds. A scout working on the Fishing merit badge has to identify the fish they catch, not just land it — and five species is a short enough list to learn on the subway ride over.

Prospect Park Lake

Rules, Licenses and Tackle

Most of what follows is not a derby rule. It is New York City law for every freshwater park in the five boroughs, and it applies whether there is a derby on or not — which is exactly why a scout can count reading it as real work toward a merit badge.

• ✅ Catch and release only. All freshwater fishing in NYC parks is catch and release. Nothing goes home.
• ✅ Barbless hooks are required in freshwater. They come out of a fish — and out of a thumb — far more easily.
• ✅ Lead-free sinkers are required for weights of ½ ounce or less. Lost lead dissolves slowly and is toxic to wildlife and to people.
• ✅ Non-stainless-steel hooks are recommended. If a hook is lost or swallowed, plain steel rusts away; stainless does not.
• ✅ A New York State DEC freshwater fishing license is required at 16 and older. Under 16 needs nothing. A one-day resident license is $5 online from the NYS DEC. New York also designates a handful of free fishing days each year, when no license is needed at any age — none of them falls on derby weekend, but they are worth knowing about.
• ✅ Carry out all your trash, and pick up any line, hooks or lures you find. Discarded fishing line entangles birds.

Check your tackle box before you leave the house

This is where families get caught out. An inherited or long-unopened tackle box will very likely hold barbed hooks and lead split shot, and neither is allowed here. Pinch the barbs flat with pliers or buy barbless, and swap the split shot for tin or tungsten. Sorting it out at home takes five minutes; sorting it out on the shore takes the morning.

What to bring

• A rod and reel if you have one — or nothing, and make a pole on arrival
• Barbless hooks, lead-free sinkers, and bait or small lures
• Needle-nose pliers — the single most useful thing in the bag, for flattening barbs and freeing hooks
• A printed or downloaded fishing license, for anyone 16 or older
• Water, lunch and snacks — the day runs through the middle of it
• Sunscreen, a hat and bug spray; there is not much shade on the shore
• A folding chair or a blanket
• A towel or rag, and a plastic bag for your own trash

Working Toward the Fishing Merit Badge

A morning on the lake covers a genuine share of the Fishing merit badge — not the whole badge, but the parts that need water and a fish, which are the parts that are hardest to arrange in Brooklyn.

What a scout can realistically do here:

• Catch a fish and identify it — the requirement that stops most scouts, and the reason to come.
• Demonstrate the use of fishing equipment, and tie the knots the badge asks for while rigging up.
• Catch and release — what it means, why it matters, and how to return a fish to the water safely. This event is nothing but catch and release, so the practice and the requirement are the same act.
• Review the fishing regulations where you live — the license rules, the barbless-hook rule and the lead-free rule above are those regulations.
• Leave No Trace, and sportsmanlike behavior under the Outdoor Code. A competition with medals is a better test of the second one than a classroom.

One requirement you cannot finish here, and it is worth knowing before you go. The badge asks a scout to clean and cook a fish. Freshwater fishing in New York City is catch and release only, so nothing caught in Prospect Lake can be kept, cleaned or cooked. That part has to be done somewhere else — on a summer camp waterfront, on a family trip out of the city, or through the badge's own alternative, which allows a scout to acquire a fish rather than catch one.

And the standing rule for all of it: attending an event does not sign a requirement — a merit badge counselor does. Talk to a counselor before the derby about what they want to see, and come back with notes and a photograph of the fish. Note that Fishing is not currently on our merit badge counselors list, which covers the badges Troop 23 can counsel in-house — so ask at a Monday meeting who to work with on this one.

Thinking About Scouting?

If you found this page looking for somewhere your kid can fish in Brooklyn, and they are not in a pack or a troop yet — the derby is open to registered scouts, but the door into scouting is open all year.

Troop 23 is a boys' Scouts BSA troop for ages 11 to 17, meeting Monday evenings at Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge — the parish that has housed it since 1946, in a troop that has been running in Brooklyn since 1910. Cub Scout Pack 23 covers kindergarten through fifth grade and meets in the same building on the same evening. How to join has the practical details and the right person to contact.

What a year looks like: a skills weekend in September, shooting sports in October, a cooking campout in November, winter camping, a week of summer camp, and — recently — a bike expedition to Maine.

Troop 23 and the Derby

Troop 23 does not field a contingent at this derby, and did not in 2025 either. It is a council event at the far end of the borough on a Saturday morning, families come to it one at a time, and our own September is already dense. None of that is a comment on the event — it is a good morning, and we would rather point families at it than let it go unnoticed.

There is one connection worth pointing out. The evening before the derby, Troop 23 is at the other end of Brooklyn working the 9/11 vigil at the American Veterans Memorial Pier — and that pier is itself on the NYC Parks list of Brooklyn fishing spots, a saltwater one, known for striped bass. A scout could stand a color guard on a fishing pier on Friday night and fish a freshwater lake on Saturday morning, in the same borough, without ever leaving it.

Last year's edition: Brooklyn Fishing Derby 2025.