Litton's Fishing Lines: 300th Anniversary of Edward Teaches' Decapitation

Thursday, August 23, 2018

300th Anniversary of Edward Teaches' Decapitation

It's the 300-year anniversary of the decapitation of pirate Blackbeard here at Ocracoke, and the celebrations go on by the minute and the hour. We sacrificed a mess of fish to the honor of the Virginia Governor, Alexander Spotswood, who ordered Edward Teaches' death, sending a ship south and ending, among worse acts, the unholy collusion between the pirate and some of the ancestors of people here today. I would only be joking, since none of us invoked Spotswood by any intent or recollection, if not for correlation between the anniversary and some thoughts of mine about two ways of looking at life.

All that about a pirate and a little island with so much better going for it is deep in the past and the collusion between the murderer and some of the early island residents is as shrouded in mystery, perhaps, as the location(s) of Blackbeard's treasure. My son says he buried silver bars somewhere or other, never found, and probably never to be found. Blackbeard is marketed on the island today, but the best of the attractions offers admission to a small museum portraying an objective account by featuring displays allowing visitors to infer that it was real and came to a gruesome but just end. Surely none of the island's early residents had any real need of him. I can only imagine human sympathy got taken in, and likely also an element of fascination for an awesomely bold man with great personal courage, though on the wrong side in a world of good and evil, who began his seamanship as an aboveboard sailor, and is said to have possibly come from a wealthy family.

I don't know as much about Ocracoke as I should. Its history. But I do know the fishing village is resilient. I've purchased some books and have read a couple of them, hoping to find time to read more, all the while knowing that no matter how many hurricanes lap up against the sand here vulnerable to these storms, when evacuations get called, a stronghold of residents won't budge and the social life of the island will go on just as it has for hundreds of years. The O'Neal family, among others, has roots here in a time when people spoke a very different English, Elizabethan or Shakespeare's English, difficult to understand, and the only dialect spoken here not very long ago. A little of the brogue remains, it's said, though I've never heard it besides getting captivated by a recording, unless I have a vague memory of overhearing speech in 1969. My first visit was not very long after the time Ocracoke emerged from more than 300 years of isolation. Now we have wifi here.

We met Ryan O'Neal going on 10 years ago. He was the youngest charter Captain to get his license here in the Southeast. He's had clients since age 18, but most are one-time deals, I believe. Before we left the dock on Thursday, he urged me to call if we needed anything during the remainder of our stay. Offhand, I can't count the number of times we've fished the inlet and just outside together, and each venture offers something different.

Especially today, gray weakfish, or as they call them here, trout, made the difference. That's Matt with one of his in the photo above. Before we got into these fish, we began fishing as we always have, by trolling, catching blues and Spanish mackerel on Clark spoons getting five to maybe seven feet deep by use of planers. Trolling is for the birds. Those birds are always the aim. The baitfish schools rove and dive, and wherever they come up the terns and gulls seem to find them first, but there's no telling by so obvious a sign as congregated and diving birds that the fish we're after stay on them most tenaciously.

In 2011, as we caught sheepshead, I asked Ryan about trout, and he said he puts clients on them sometimes, but I felt left to an aura of mystery. So today I felt skeptical about us catching any. And as events unfolded, we drifted using squid for bait a long quarter mile or so before either of us got a hit. Ryan invited Trish to fish, but she declined the offer. How anyone can deny the fun, once a fish gets on, is more of a mystery to me than trout, but I recall an incident years ago when Trish hooked a striper in the surf. The look on her face was despairing rather than thrilled. She just held the rod and refused to reel. Once I got by her side, she gave the rod to me.

There are two ways of looking at life. (Don't ask me how many other ways.) It's one big festival or else it's mass panic. According to the latter view, every living thing is always ducking for cover. We humans have the moral responsibility to aid. Of course, the realism involved in the festival feeling would seem perverse to prevailing moral sentiment among us. Creatures everywhere devouring one another and having a great time at it. As gray trout eat little fish with abandon, we put them on ice to fillet and eat for lunch. (That lunch was delicious, by the way. We had killed the fish about an hour prior.)

It's really not so simple. We humans do have a moral responsibility to aid where we can, such as releasing fish in healthy condition. I think in my wife's hands, the rod with a striped bass on could have felt disturbing. I feel plenty of empathy for this. But I don't take the view that a fighting fish is "terrified." In pain, perhaps, though nothing like pain I would feel with a hook set in my mouth and a line pulling. The world of nature is pure competition. So a fish on a hook sort of expects a struggle. And gives it! We humans make the best of life through cooperation. Anyone who has to compete all day at work to make nickels and dimes as profit margin....not a whole lot more...knows that the stress isn't very good for him. Go on vacation and if you don't feel things come together--cooperating--you've failed your visit. And you know your success is as human life should be. Coming together and feeling good about what you do.

Suddenly--our baits began to work their way up a drop-off from 26 feet towards shallows--we were into fish. In addition to two Spanish of about 18 inches and a bluefish on the troll, I caught two more blues (these fish about 14 inches), two fluke, and three gray weakfish. Matt caught three grays, some blues, whiting...he lost count but caught more fish than I did. One of his gray trout was too small and tenderly released by Ryan.

"What are we after today?" I asked him when we met before leaving the dock to enter three-mile-wide Ocracoke Inlet.

"I was going to take you out for red drum. I can't get the bait."

"I read in one of the fishing reports there're a lot around."

Red drum have been on my mind for awhile. Forty, fifty, sixty pounds. Maybe next time.

From the beach this afternoon, in-between reading Chris Dombrowski's Body of Water, I caught a kingfish, a member of the drum family smaller than a croaker, mine about nine inches. It took an eighth-ounce jig tipped with a piece of shrimp fished on my light St. Croix rod.

Back home, preparing for shark fishing tonight, Matt took off to get bait, finding a number of new Pamlico Sound spots, scoring four bluefish on that Hopkins Shorty in the process. That's bait. He also asked a young woman about his age, described as beautiful, for a few of the fish she caught on bait and would have tossed back. So he's prepared.