Man dies persuing his dream......
He caught a dream on his last cast
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...7_danny31.html
Danny Westneat -Seattle Times staff columnist
When you die ? when you shuffle off this mortal coil as Shakespeare put it ? the pressure is on to go out doing something you love.
But what are the odds of that happening? It's much more likely the end will come shuffling than soaring. You'll die driving to work, say. Or lying in some hospice ward. If you're lucky you might pass while you're sleeping.
Dan Dodds surely wasn't thinking about final moments when he decided to get up early most mornings this summer to go fishing. He was only 62, and in good health. Semiretired, he wanted to put some serious hours into a lifelong passion.
"He loved fishing because it was just him and the fish," says his brother, Mike Dodds, of Bellingham. "Matching wits with the fish, then usually losing ? he loved that."
So Dodds was believed to be in a fine mood already when he showed up to fish the beach at Keystone Spit, on Whidbey Island, one recent morning. Even though he had been "skunked" all season ? hadn't caught a fish worth mentioning.
He was there Aug. 18 trying for the big run of pink salmon, a fish that typically weighs 3 to 5 pounds. Onlookers later told the Whidbey News-Times that nobody had caught anything that day. But at least the sunrise had been "unusually striking."
Suddenly Dodds got a yank on his line so powerful that it eventually lurched him off the beach and into the Sound.
Other fishermen say Dodds fought to land the fish for about 20 minutes, traveling up and down the beach and several times waist-deep into the water.
Dodds' prize was a 28-pound king, or chinook, salmon. It was the biggest salmon he'd ever caught, and easily the biggest fish he'd landed from shore using such light tackle.
According to the Whidbey paper, he told a nearby fisherman: "That's the fish of my dreams."
Then he fell face first into the water and died.
The official cause of death was heart attack.
Friends and relatives have been weighing Dodds' death ever since. It was so out of the blue that it's tragic. But given the circumstances, should they be sad?
"It's hard, because it made his life and then it ended his life," says Mike Dodds.
"It's been kind of surreal, for all of us," says Ron Bodamer, a fishing buddy of Dodds' and a real-estate agent in Coupeville, where Dodds lived. "You wonder, did catching the fish of his dreams do him in?"
There was the physical exertion, but Dodds seemed to be in good enough shape, Bodamer says.
"They said he was grinning ear to ear. He was overjoyed. I guess you put it together and it was all too much for his heart."
So maybe the real cause of death was fishing bliss?
Last Friday evening, about a hundred of Dodds' friends and relatives convened on the beach not far from where he caught his king. They told fish stories about him. They made ceremonial casts into the water (fortunately, nobody hooked anything).
A nephew suggested we should all get so lucky.
"Of course the sunrise was unusually striking that morning," Dorian Dodds said at the memorial, according to those present. "Of course it was the fish of Dan's dreams ... . At that moment, he was in that elusive place where heaven and Earth nearly become one. When they separated, he stayed on the other side."
There's not much to add to that, other than: Amen.
Oh, and that when the speechifying was done, they barbecued Dodds' dream and ate it, looking out over Admiralty Inlet and the setting sun.
Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.
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