For My Grandfather

Teaching us to tell time by the ring of the church bells

Milk shakes at Minnie’s and ice cream cups at the VFW

Road Runner, Wild Kingdom, Wheel of Fortune and peanuts in the glass dish

The smell of K-1 in the shed and tires in the warehouse

Rainy afternoons on the porch and the Red Sox on the radio

Weekends at Camp and red hot dogs over wood fires

Hours and hours teaching me to tie my own shoes

Telling me swimming lessons would help later in life

Teaching us to row the tin boat and paddle a canoe

Those rocket sleds you gave Georgia and I at Christmas and the rides we had

Showing me where the perch were and how to handle a pickerel

Sharing Dairy-Joy with Pepper in the backseat of that old green car

Discussing who was most underrated; Remy or Burleson

Being there for concerts, races and collecting coins

Paddling the canoe beside me on training swims and saying

“Aren’t you glad you took those swimming lessons now?”

High school and college graduations saying you knew I could do it

Asking to see my badge and gun and putting on my shoulder rig

All quickly done when my mother left the room

Listening to your stories of service at sea and what war really means

Your silent worrying while I was on the street and in the shadows

Late night calls to Mom to make sure I got off the mountain or the water

Explaining to you why baitfish flies don’t look like “flies”

Your words after my first article was published

Watching you hold my daughter for the very first time

Seeing you with her when we visit

Listening to you tell her things you told me

And this past Christmas with the whole family there

Making jokes like you always have and the joy in your eyes

Of having your life in one room, all together…one last time

Much of my life has been spent far away

And though I’ve been gone in my own way I’m still there

For what you gave made me strong and guides me well 

Your words and wisdom from where I began

Shall not be forgotten as I continue on toward the sun

Rest now Grampa and watch from above until that day

I’ll see you on the other side

13 April 2015
North River, MA

Blind Casts

I’ve come to these places dozens of times since the last fish headed south in November.

On clear bright days to feel the sun reflect off the water.

In advance of storms to breath in that haunting silence that occurs just before the first snowflake falls. 

In the bitter cold when nothing moves.

In the midst of blizzards to listen to the rage and fury of wind and water and be reminded that as much as we try to push her back, Mother Nature will always be more powerful.     

To watch the sun rise and paint the fresh canvas that She always leaves behind.

I come to these places because even in the off season they are part of my day, of most of what I do, of nearly every thought. Thoughts of sweet long casts to the skinny water in the back corner, schoolies racing out from behind pilings to crush a topwater, happy fish sipping on a shrimp hatch at the edge of the grass…the possibility of the next cast.

Winter has passed. Spring begins.

Bring it.

North River, MA

30 March 2015

Whiskey

Whiskey. It’s one of his handles, no pun intended. His true name given to him at birth is Richard.

We became friends not long after I started my fly business and he started guiding on Boston Harbor. We met through our involvement in a now defunct conservation group; he at the state level and I from a local chapter. The first email I received from him began with “Dude, …” I knew we would get along just fine.

We were the youngsters in the group and structured meetings to include time for fried food, beer and long discussions of pointless matters deemed more relevant to mankind as the beer count increased. Things like fly color versus profile, the Kobayashi Maru test, dollar values of a hitter’s slugging percentage and of course the question of Ginger or Mary Ann.

And there was the time he and his brother and I sat behind Gov. Bill Richardson at Fenway. A side note for those playing at home, the governor pitched a season in the Cape League in the 60’s. We spent most of the game trying to talk him into going fishing with us. Relentlessly. It was before I Phones and a year before YouTube came on the scene which is unfortunate because it was one of our finer performances.

Richard is one of those guys I only see once in a while but know if I ever need something, he will have my back. Ours is a friendship born from fishing and forged on the search for another story. Because of schedules it’s been a couple of years since we’ve been on the water together but we stay up to date through electronic devices. I look forward to the next quest.

2006 was one of the years that blue fin tuna were everywhere and one of the last years that “footballs”  and “schoolies” were mixed in thick. I had built some flies for these smaller fish based on the bait and conditions that Richard had been running into while chasing them. I kept waiting for the call that he or one of his clients had hooked up to one using my flies but getting a fly into the face of a fish moving so fast through acres of bait, well, it’s not as easy as one might think. He invited me to find out for myself on Labor Day that year.

We left the dock just before sunrise and made the run offshore in near perfect conditions. We got to the numbers Richard had been fishing the previous few days and powered down to look for birds. It didn’t take long. We found the fish and eased up to the edge of the school. I had never seen anything like it. Tuna were breaking the surface everywhere from thirty pounds to three hundred. I reached for the fly rod and watched these fish as I stripped line out. This is where, in fishing vernacular, I lost my shit. Very much like tarpon or albie fishing, I lost all motor skills and ability to process thoughts. I managed a feeble twenty foot cast and Richard suggested I use a spinning rod for the first one. I quickly secured the fly rod and grabbed a spinning rod. It was set up for a left hand retrieve. I retrieve with my right hand. In the chaos of the moment I didn’t see this as insurmountable. I was wrong.

I made my first cast and watched the SPRO popper snap off and disappear. Richard handed me another rod. Next cast same thing. Richard shut the power down and quietly went about setting up a rod for a right hand retrieve with a Deadly Dick attached to it. The mood was tense. He handed me the rod and in a mix of four letter words and something about twenty dollars told me not to lose anymore gear.

We caught up to the fish and Richard got the boat in close. I made several casts without losing metal and started to regain control of my body. A few more casts and I was on. It felt like I had hooked a car on the Red Line between North Quincy and JFK. The first run the fish made reminded me that I used to be an athlete and that I might want to get back on the fitness program. The whole time I was bringing the fish in we were surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of blue fin porpoising and crashing bait. It was surreal. It took about twenty-five minutes to get the fish boat side. Richard tailed it, brought it in and guessed it to be about forty pounds. It had felt at least twice that size in the water. I’m a catch and release guy but when Richard asked me if I wanted to keep it I said I had to keep this fish.

With a fish in the box we caught up with the tuna again and fished the school for the next couple of hours. I knew there was no way I was going to be successful with the fly rod so I stayed on the spinning gear. At one point Richard made a few casts and we doubled up. The stress of losing the tackle and my mind earlier now diminished, we ran around the boat passing rods back and forth singing 80’s hair band songs and giggling like school girls. I don’t normally keep score but on that day I did. Five tuna hooked, three boated.

We ran back to Wollaston Beach to pick up Richard’s son, Justin, and spent a couple of hours trying to get him on some striped bass. I made a few casts but spent most of that time sipping a beer and replaying images of those tuna ripping through the water.

By three o’clock we were toast and pulled the boat and went back to Richard’s house. Our friend, Eric Kulin, arrived to cut up my fish while I washed down the boat. The work done, we all sat in the late afternoon sun eating sashimi and drinking beer as I told Eric about catching that first one. Later, a glass of whiskey in my hand, I sat there listening to Richard tell the story of the day and thought of those fish and of my friends. I realized that over time the memory of those fish will fade and perhaps be forgotten. These friendships will not.

It’s the people that make the memory.

 

Photo from Boston Fishstix Facebook page.

 For bass, blues, albies, tuna and recommendations for a proper whiskey, check out:

 Capt. Richard Armstrong and Boston Fishstix

 Capt. Eric Kulin and Snap Shot Charters

From the snowbank

16 Feb 2015

A World Away

I had planned on fishing most of the morning; I didn’t plan on staying for most of the day. I got there two hours before dead low under a clear sky and a light breeze. The fishing had been consistent during the last of the drop. Sand eels were everywhere and the stripes were chewing on flat-wings with gusto. During the slack I started seeing a bunch of smaller schoolies coming up into just a few inches of water along the sand and then race back into the deep hole. A bit odd I thought. I was going to write it off as one of those things that happens when fishing sometimes until I figured out what the deal was.

It took a while because I didn’t have my glasses on. And I was watching planes. Yes, planes. The North and South Rivers are right under the flight path heading into Logan so there are always planes in the sky. These schoolies were not interested in the flat-wings. I figured I’d just keep mindlessly casting the flat-wing until the water changed. So I was watching airplanes.

I’ll get to the planes shortly. There is some back-story that needs to be explained. My sister and I grew up on a farm in western Maine in the seventies. While it wasn’t “out in the sticks”, it wasn’t suburbia either. I’m going to sound really old here kids, but I remember the weekly trips into town. It was a big deal. Don’t get me wrong, there were probably more trips into town than I’m letting on but this is my story. The weekly “trip” I’m talking about was going in town to the grocery store, the drug store, the Farmer’s Union and if we were lucky, maybe Woolworth’s or J.J. Newberry’s. The best part for me was the weekly stop at the Norway Library.

Every summer I participated in the reading program. If you read a certain number of books you received something. I have no memory of what the tangible incentive was but I remember the awesome wonder that the library represented. I think you were limited to checking out five books at a time. I would check out my limit and, with the assistance of a flashlight, usually have all of them read two days before the next trip to town. Those two days were supplemented with back issues of National Geographic and Outdoor Life. Every week those five books introduced me to people and took me to places and doing things that at the time seemed a world away.

I clearly remember one of these trips to town just before the Fourth of July in 1977. Of the five books I checked out that week, one was “Airborne: A Sentimental Journey” by William F. Buckley and another was “Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft” by Thor Heyerdahl. The librarian asked me if I was going to actually read both of them. I said I was and I did. I was eleven. Fourteen years later I would begin living my own stories at sea.

My reading time was sandwiched in between swimming lessons and farm chores with my sister. My mother, aware that chores would get done with less protest if they were entertaining, introduced us to a game to curtail the monotony of weeding tomatoes, snapping beans and shelling peas. She would tell us to watch the sky for airplanes and then try to guess where the plane was going or had come from and who was on it.  We would make up stories together, but off to the side I was imagining flying to places and doing things with the characters and people I had read about. Sailing Cyrano with Buckley, surviving at sea with Heyerdahl, running sled dogs in the Yukon with Jack London, fighting the British with Ethan Allen, exploring the West with Lewis and Clark, fishing with Ted Williams, wondering why anyone would go to Cleveland and dreaming of the ocean.

So here I was on this day, calling on this game taught to me by my mother to pass the time. I watched an airplane beginning its descent into Boston and remembered making the same descent returning from places I have fished that as a boy seemed impossible to get to. My attention returned to the schoolies in the shallows. I decided to change flies and switched my sunglasses for my reading glasses. I happened to look down into the water at my feet and instantly knew what had been going on around me while I was day dreaming. There were clouds of grass shrimp no larger than a half inch grouped together at the edge of the water.

I tied on a #4 orange Crazy Charlie. A bonefish fly but also one of the most effective flies for most species I’ve fished for. I was instantly on to stripes. No big hero fish, just a lot of river sized fish that I think are as fun to catch as the big ones. But I was sight casting to these guys in the skinny water. I’ve paid hundreds of dollars a day to do the same thing in distant places but was now doing it literally in my backyard. I kept moving up the flat as the tide came in. The higher up, the more the shrimp and the fish spread out but they were still there. I finally had to end things before I would be forced to swim off the flat.

I made one more cast. I thought of Buckley and Heyerdahl. I watched one more airplane returning from somewhere far away. I thought of the Norway Library and of all those stories contained inside of it. I thought of all the places I’ve been to and all the things I’ve done as I’ve wandered and wondered what is over the horizon or around the next bend. I looked around at the water surrounding me and the river and marsh that I continue to explore. This place is my own library, a collection of my own stories. I didn’t have to go a world away to find them. I only had to come home.

North River, MA

July 2014