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I've been diligently keeping a fishing log
this year, the first time I've made it through
a good part of the season and have continued to
do so. It started off just as a balance sheet,
really, to see how often I fish and how many fish
I catch. But then, like most things I do, it grew
into a compulsion.
I usually fish alone to avoid the "ha ha I caught
more than him oh no he caught more than me"
competition that inevitably occurs. I've blamed
this in the past on my fishing partners; they were
competitive, I was not, but got caught up in the
moment. But since keeping the log I've come to
realize that we tend to avoid in others what we
most dislike about ourselves, and, regrettably,
this competitive syndrome is as ingrained in me
as anyone else. So the log went from the mere
recording of numbers to a standard I had to meet;
so many times fishing per week, so many fish per
outing. And now that I know that I'm averaging X
number of fish, if I only catch Y, I get frantic -
"if I don't get two more bass I'll lower my average!"
If only I had been this way about my grade point
average in school.
Somehow I became obsessed with landing 200 bass
by the end of July. The number and date was
arbitrary; I had headed into the month with over
100 fish, and by July 24 needed only 8 fish to
reach my dubious goal. I'm one forced to fish
when I can, no matter the tide or time or weather,
but this particular day looked good; an outgoing
tide that moves fish and overcast skies with a bit
of rain which usually keeps the yahoos at the docks.
I paddled to Key West, one of my favorite spots
to fish. You might be surprised to learn that Key
West isn't in Florida; it's a small marsh beach in
Plum Island Sound only accessible by boat. An
angling friend and I have named all of our favorite
spots after famous fishing locations: Tierra Del
Fuego, Key West, Key Largo, Andros, etc. Partly
this is our little joke, acknowledgement that we
will likely never be able to actually fish these
spots, but it's also subterfuge. We reference our
favorite spots without divulging information, and
can say in a crowd, "I hammered them this morning at
T.D.F." and no one listening will know what we're
talking about. Fishing spies, after all, are
everywhere.
I was fishing a baitfish pattern that is a
combination of a traditional flat wing and a
thunder creek style streamer that has been very
effective for me this year. The pattern is my
own design, which I'm hesitant to say, as I'm
sure that, given the long history of fly tying,
someone else has surely thought to marry these
patterns, and I once believed for an entire year
that I invented the half and half (a combination
of Lefty's Deceiver and a Clouser deep minnow,
though I called mine the 'declouser') before I
learned that such an obvious cloning had taken
place long before one was born at my vise. But
choice of fly patterns in the salt is usually a
moot point. One of the beauties of salt water
fly fishing is the simplicity of fly selection,
and no doubt an article detailing a fly fishing
trip for the heretofore believed extinct coelacanth
would recommend using a white deceiver or chartreuse
clouser.
It was two hours before low and I fished Key West
using my favorite technique, something I learned
from Jack Gartside's Striper Strategies. I'd start
at one end of the beach, cast, then strip in the
fly while walking with and at the same speed as
the tide. If I hooked a fish I'd play and land
it, then back up and fish that particular part
of the beat again to see if there was a slough
where the stripers were lying in wait to ambush
helpless baitfish. I continued until I reached
the end of the beach, maybe 75 yards, then walk
back and start over. The lines of footprints in
the sand, each below the other and parallel to
the receding tide, marked my progress.
I caught fish on each rotation, two on the first,
two more on the second, then three on the third.
It was all too easy, and I was quickly up to 199.
The bass weren't large and I played them hard to
land them quickly, mentally adding them to the
tally before they were even in hand. Stripers
are a school fish and, much like school children
in the same grade, swim in a school of similar
sized fish, sometimes so much so that if seems
as if you're catching the same one over and over.
But, again like school children, there will be
that anomaly, the big fish in the school of fry
that catches you off guard when he takes the fly
and jerks you out of the trance induced by hooking
cookie cutter fish on nearly every cast. What
would have been my 200th was such a fish. I
misjudged his size and played him too hard, believing
him to be another school bass that I could land quickly.
But he sent up a plume of spray when he boiled on the
surface 60 feet out, as big bass often do, and while
I frantically tried to get him on the reel he broke
off.
"Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit
before the fall," wisely cautions Proverbs xvi, 18,
and as penance for my hubris, I rightly lost the best
bass of the day. But the fish gods are kind, and I was
soon on again, and, taking no chance, went right to
the reel. And it was a good thing; the fish ran and
took line, stopped and wouldn't budge, fighting for
every inch I tried to regain. I finally got him close
to the beach and I could see, not a bass, but a big
blue that, as blues do, turned sideways so that reeling
him in was like pulling a tree stump. Putting as much
pressure on the line as I dared, and using the waves
to win the tug of war, I beached him, a 27-inch blue
fish -- the first one I'd taken this year, which seemed
somehow appropriate.
I updated the fishing log and deleted expectations.
For the rest of the season I would be a fisherman,
not an accountant. ~ Dave
About Dave:
Dave Micus lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He is an
avid striped bass fly fisherman, writer and instructor.
He writes a fly fishing column for the Port City Planet
newspaper of Newburyport, MA (home of Plum Island and Joppa Flats)
and teaches a fly fishing course at Boston University.
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