Fishing – Our technological infirmity

The Evolution of a Fisherman

**Puppy Drum, a Red Drum small enough that most fisherman throw them back**

The society of fishermen (and women who fish) is far more open minded thanyour average members of the population.

In politics, the mobility between conservative and liberal groups is almost non-existent. It would be fair to say that without some extraordinary circumstance once you are born a conservative, the chances of becoming a liberal are very slim unless you get whacked on the head with a police billy club. Likewise most liberals would only become conservatives if they won the lottery and caught a bad case of greed.

Fisherman really do not care about your history unless it is fishing history, they care about what you are catching today and how you are doing it. Everything beyond that is pretty much irrelevant unless you are trapped inside a house in a blizzard and have no entertainment beyond the stories you can spin.

Actually you can be a worm dunker one day, and a dry fly fisherman the next day. No one will care except the worms. Fortunately, I was born into a Presbyterian family which if you have seen the movie, A River Runs Through It, means I should be a dry fly fisherman. For many years, that was most of fishing.

Actually, I fished with a fly rod before I was even a teenager, but I have avoided the purity of only one type of angling. I came from a long line of worm dunkers on my mother’s side. No only did they dunk worms, they also dunked shrimp and fished along the North Carolina coast for whatever was biting. They caught a lot of fish every fall that they took home to fill their freezers.

When it comes to fishing, I have tried almost any method though I now lean away from the dark side of using live bait . There is a certain point in your fishing life when catching fish is not nearly as important as catching certain fish by a particular means. While most sports seek out ways to be more productive, fishermen often seek out ways which are more difficult and which result in fewer fish being caught. Often it doesn’t even matter if you catch something or not. It is the time on or by the water and the comradeship of your fishing buddy.

I was blessed to live for sixteen years on the NC coast in what was close to fishing heaven at the time. I did catch fish to be proud of just a couple of minutes from the dock behind our home. One quest was to catch a bluefish from the surf on a light spinning rod using an artificial lure. It is not an impossible task, I had actually done it before butnfar more often from a boat than from the surf. If you get a shiny lure in front of feeding bluefish, you will usually catch something. So catching one is not a huge challenge. However, if you give yourself a short time window and a long beach to read, then the challenge becomes a little more fun.

One evenng we left our home on the banks of the White Oak for a 15-20 minute drive to one of my favorite beaches. I like it because there are rarely people there for much of the year, and I have caught fish there before. That evening we got there a little after seven PM and stayed for around thirty minutes. That was all the time I had allotted myself to catch a bluefish.

It was a great evening to be on the beach. In fact when we headed home around eight PM, the temperature was still 80F. Anyway, I started my fishing with a Gotcha plug. I probably fished with it for the first fifteen minutes with no luck. Then I switched to a gold spoon. The sun was starting to drop quickly, and I had been watching a number of jumping fish just out of the range of my casts.

I was hoping the light from the dropping sun might make my lure more attractive.It was the third cast with the gold spoon when I got a solid hit. My next cast there was nothing, but on the following cast I hooked a bluefish but it quickly threw the hook. One more throw, and I had another hit and was solidly onto a nice bluefish. It did not take long to bring him to shore. He was about sixteen inches long. I quickly heaved him back into the surf and told my wife that I was done. She could not believe that I did not want to fish more, but I had accomplished what I wanted to do and the feeling was good. I was actually using a very light, long spinning rod which was purchased more with the soft mouths of trout in mind than bluefish. Of course that added a little to the challenge.

There are always more challenges for a fisherman. One of the most exciting is catching North Carolina’s state fish, the Red Drum, on an artificial lure.

On Saturday, November 5, 2016, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful out on the water. I managed to catch and release a sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks near our home in my kayak. I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In ten days, I landed with artificial lures, ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I only kept one red drum but I kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

That is only a sample of my fishing tales. Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory. I caught some memorable fish.

Memories to hold close

I wrote this back in the fall of 2016. It was one of the nicest falls that we enjoyed in our fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. I wrote more than one post arguing that fall was even nicer on the coast than in the mountains.

Here is a brief description of the memorable month of November 2016, as seen from the water and the beaches of Carteret County.

The good fishing and nearly perfect weather, continues but I can already feel the best of fall sliding away.

On Saturday, November 5, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful as you can see from the marsh grass picture. I also managed to catch and release another sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks in my kayak and I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In the last ten days, I have landed ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I have only kept one red drum but I have kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

Last year, 2015, we did not have a fishing season like this one. I blamed it all on the early October rain we got. It is hard to miss a fishing season when fall fishing on the coast is such a tradition. This year we have been lucky. Since Mathew dropped three inches of rain on us October 8, we have only had two-tenths of an inch on October 22, and another two-tenths of an inch on November 4.

Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory.

Being Part of the World

Back in the not so good world of the fifties when we feared polio and practiced hiding under desks to keep us safe from nuclear war, connecting with the world wasn’t optional. There is a good chance you walked to school. It was likely played dodge ball or kick ball on the playground in the morning. After getting home, many of us headed to the woods to maintain our forts and dams. Then there was mowing yards and even some garden work at times. Digging worms certainly connected me to Mother Earth and to the wrath of my mother if I got too close to some of her flowers.

Weekends were often devoted to Boy Scouts and camping on a nearby by farm. Our water came from an old hand pump. We pitched tents and cooked over open fires. We usually had an adult with us but in the early days when there only half a dozen of us, we often camped without one. No one feared the dark or worried about crazies with guns. When we weren’t in the woods with other Scouts, we were sometimes chasing squirrels with rifles and shotguns.

Fishing was a much more successful endeavor. It was not unusual for my mother to drop my best friend, Mike, and me at my some fishing ponds in the next county. She wasn’t an irresponsible mother, we were responsible kids who knew out to swim and take care of ourselves. I cannot even count the number of days we spent fishing without seeing another person before we were old enough to drive. We did catch fish and we ate them.

We still lived in a world where there were more country stores than supermarkets. People had big gardens. When the weather got cold in the fall, some relative would always bring some fresh country sausage. In the summer mother would can tomatoes and beans and freeze corn.

As we got older I went away to military school and then to college. I did not come back to stay for sixty years, but the connections to the natural world had already been made.

By the time I got to college, I was desperate to get back to the woods. Even spending the summers camping and traveling to Alaska wasn’t enough.

So Maine it was during college and then Nova Scotia and eventually Newfoundland. There were float plane trips into the bush, rides on an ice breaker that got stuck in the ice, and wandering the woods where it was nearly impossible to know where you were without a map and compass.

While my love of the outdoors almost got derailed by the toxic work environment at Apple, I eventually escaped to North Carolina’s Crystal Coast which my oldest son claimed was barely clinging to civilization because we had no Chipotle.

There might have been a shortage of chain fast-food, but it was a place where a kayak or a skiff could take you to natural worlds that stretched your imagination. Over time those placed healed my soul and helped me to reconnect with the world beyond our houses.

By 2017, I was walking 10,000 steps a day for a whole year which is equivalent to 69 marathons a year. I had piloted our skiff over 500 hours, paddled and biked endless miles. We managed to compost all our household waste and grow far more vegetables than we could eat.

All that helped me recover from Apple and get the strength to complete the circle and move back home. It has been a successful trip home. We’re back to gardening and I still hike some.

However, I worry about the generations after us that never forged the link with the outside world. They never camped and fished their way through childhood and even if they did, the screens and phones seduced them. We were immune. There is no meaning to be gained from screens. There might be important words on the screen but if the words just lead you to another screen you have gained nothing but more screen time.

Yet if your hands have ever worked in dirt, even it they have been clean for a long time, the dirt will welcome them back and it won’t be long before the long suppressed memories guide the hands back to growing things. Those growing plants will remind you that you are just one of many living things that are all interconnected. If you can get to that point, you are on the right track to a worthwhile relationship with yourself and the world.

Just The Thought of Being On The Water

After the stress of the last couple of days, just thinking about being on the water is a good thing. Some actual time on the water looks mighty appealing. Click the link or the picture. #crystalcoast http://ow.ly/ol7lD