Home Water

The season is over, at least here in the marsh. Today was one of the few Saturday's I haven't been out there or some other piece of water since late April. Instead of rigging rods I've been making a list of what needs to be done at the house. It's essentially the same list I made at the end of last winter plus about two dozen more tasks I've put off. So, on my way to Lowes I drove out to the point where I could get a look at it one more time before starting on that list.

I've been on this water for nearly two decades. I don't just live on it, it runs through me. I measure time not by the hands of my watch or the calendar on the kitchen wall but by the ebb and flow of the tide running through it, the shift in the seams of its currents and the sound of its waves on the beach. I know it as well as I know myself. I can find my way through it as easily as walking through the house in the dark. It's home.

We all have it. Home water. It might be a series of pools on a stream, a particular rip off a rock pile, miles of water along some tributary or wide open ocean. For some it might be water they grew up on, for others it may be the closest water to where they live. Regardless of where it is or how it came to be known, I'm a firm believer that we don't make it, it makes us. It makes us the angler that we are and that we will become. Flats, backwater, rips, offshore, inshore, structure...we may fish multiple environs but somewhere, in the midst of hours, days and seasons spent there,  we find a connection to a particular piece of water. It becomes a part of us and we become a part of it.

Somewhere in our home water we find those special spots.  The honey hole, the go-to spot, the Location X's; we all have names for a particular place that we've learned over time generally hold fish at a particular stage of tide, hatch or time of year. Some are shared, most are not. They become a very personal place, often for no other reason than they are places we feel completely in our element where we are free to fish for the sake of fishing. Sometimes we don't fish them at all, opting instead to just stand or sit there and observe, study and contemplate. These places remind us that not every day on the water has to be hardcore, badass and epic. It's fishing. That's all it is.

Location X

There is always other water to fish and new stories to find but nothing compares to those found at home.


South River , MA
10 November 2018