I like it when an excessive mood takes me by surprise, inspiration flares, and I perform daring feats on paper with a pen, or by type and a screen, but it seems as if more often than not, my readers feel put off. There are really more exceptions to this rule than of the rule itself, which I merely assume for the sake of making my point. I always feel timid about actually going public with my performances; even when I'm feeling as bold as a lion, that uncertainty waits in shadow. As many as 90-some "likes" for a post almost overnight, just to give one example, and many others that balanced well and instead of having offended readers, these that remain as sure evidence I create posts that make readers feel good about themselves for reading what I have to relate, these at least make me feel that maybe I'm into something so much flare can compensate for. (It would be nice if every post did that.)
Anyhow, experimentation may be wise if in earnest, though I don't always know when I go astray. (That's what edit function is for. But even so...)
Let's get to the extended point. Here on Ocracoke in 2005, we had a beach afternoon and evening, and as the sun set, I caught a nice 13-inch croaker, which I cut up for bait. Naïve as I was, I was thinking of a big bull redfish. Darkness fell, and I cast two lines rigged fish-finder style, set the heavy surf rods in holders. No more than three minutes passed when Matt's rod went airborne. He caught it, and slammed the butt into the sand.
Matt was six-years-old. The line would have dug a groove into the top of his hand, as it ran over his skin at high speed. Whatever he had hooked was huge and headed for Spain.
"Take it," he told me.
Critical juncture. What an opportunity to make my little boy a hero, had I said, "No. It's your fish."
Nuts. This fish would have worn him out very early in the game. My skill at stopping the run before getting spooled amounted to some 20 yards leftover. I had made up my mind. I wasn't going to break the fish off. But to make a long story short, a half-hour later and about 200 yards down the beach, I saw my wife's flashlight go dark in the distance, and then I heard my son screaming for Dad. I put pressure on the spool and let the shark break off. I ran back to them. He thought the shark had pulled me in.
Thus began Matt's fascination with catching sharks.
At age eight, he did finish off a good one. A bonnethead from the bridge to No Name Key in Florida. With flashlight beam on the exhausted fish, I estimated its weight at 25 pounds before--together--we broke the line.
Back at the cottage, Matt got out his Florida Fishes. We both had agreed it looked like an odd hammerhead. Bonnethead. World record: 18 pounds and some ounces. So his mother and I had to do some fast thinking. We could have hoisted the big shark with a snag-treble attached to heavy cord. But the result of whatever Trish and I said was a lot of laughter among the three of us.
Now the record is over 33 pounds, but Matt could have held it a little while....
Last night, the moon was nearly full and lit the surf and the beach nicely. We built a big fire. Matt had prepared his own rig. That sentence is correctly in the singular. All of these years, I've done the bulk of the preparations, so Matt really has a lot to learn, because so much of what fishing is about, is how well you prepare before going out. As yet, he can't even cast a surf rod.
The surf was very light, wind form the northwest. Three years ago, last we were here, it was ridiculously rough, a southward flow carrying our seven-ounce sinkers like salmon eggs drifted for trout. Matt's the only rod we took and I cast, I popped the set-up into a surf spike. We started making smores. Five minutes later, the rod falls over, I pick it up, test for a bite, and sure enough, a shark, I assume, had taken the bloody cut bait. I lowered the rod tip, about to hand the rod over to Matt, when the shark lunged and the line broke as if it were four-pound test.
He needs to test his knots, too.
He was devastated, and started talking about driving home to fix another rig with wire and circle hook as he had for this fish he blew. But we had a six-pack of Big Two Hearted (after Hemingway), and he had already finished his second. His mother disallowed his plan, of course, but I said nothing, and instead, I fell back on deep thoughts about the situation.
Finally, I said, "Matt, it's not really a defeat. You just missed one hit. You could have caught two or three sharks on a night like this. Check the weather for tomorrow night. It's all one process from now until then."
It will blow from the east, but not by much, so it's quite possible he'll hook one tonight, as unlikely as hooking a trophy always might seem.
In the interim, we did our Portsmouth trip this morning and afternoon. Austin Tours. The proprietor told us up front that the tide was unusually high, and the wind from the north too heavy to land on the beach there where the inlet empties. So Trish and Matt revisited the village proper, though I kept at the fish there by the dock pier.
I caught a kingfish nearly a foot long; Matt caught another later, but what interested me most, besides the 18-inch or so gray weakfish a boy lost when trying to haul it up on the boards, were six good-size croakers I caught. I also caught a fluke, a pigfish, and innumerable pinfish (like sunnies) we call bait stealers.
Once I was privileged to fish--because given a handful--a menhaden-like baitfish about four inches long, getting no hits on slow retrieves. So I resolved to put the bait out there, weighted by a 3/4-ounce steel slip sinker, and fix the braid so neither the current pulled it off the spool with bail open, nor would the rod get pulled in by a fish. Five or ten minutes later, while reeling in another damned pinfish on Matt's abandoned rod, the tip was bouncing, but by the time I had the hook undone from the bait stealer's mouth, my hand in slight pain from the dorsal fin pricking it, whatever took that big offering, had really taken it right off the hook.
Pigfish. And sounds like that.
We call these fluke in New Jersey. Here they have to be 15 inches to take, this one short.
Atlantic croaker. They don't quite sound-off the same as pig fish.
Mr. Austin said he's astonished after every hurricane to see this house stand.
Portsmouth was last occupied in 1972, (if my recall of the date is correct). Now Park Service is a staying presence. No roads or ferry lead onto the island.
In Mr. Austin's memory, Beacon Island was 11 acres, now worn away to only three, although some 1200 brown pelican hatchlings emerged this past spring.
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