[Fredslist] [Op Ed] A Less Than Hard Hitting Morning of Fishing

[Donald Bernstein]

A Less Than Hard Hitting Morning of Fishing
 
     Early the other morning, while I was still fast asleep, Barbara came back to bed after walking the dogs, leaned over to me and said softly, "Donald, I just saw a boat right outside on the canal, they were catching fish.  Maybe you want to go fishing now."
 
     "What time is it?"  I asked.
 
     "It's 6:30.  Maybe you should go out there."
 
     Barbara lives on a canal feeding into Tampa Bay.  Her front door is steps to the water.  Not long ago we decided that we ought to try fishing.  So we went out and bought two fishing rods.
 
     Not that I have any business fishing.  In the first place, I don't know what I am doing.  And I have a constant fear of landing a hook in my cheek, or getting one stuck deep in my palm and having to push it all the way through my hand to get it out.  I have heard stories about that.
 
     The first few times we went fishing, I made Barbara bait my hook.  "You do it much better,"  I would say.  The truth is that I just didn't like the feel of the live shrimp jerking violently in my hand, and I thought it would bite me.  Barbara, on the other hand, grew up fishing with her father, and she was good at it.   The first time we tried it the only thing we caught though was her shoe that had fallen into the water and I had to fish out, which I did rather nicely I must say.
 
     After an hour of fishing we usually would have to quit once our line became a hopelessly entangled and useless bee hive.  Next time out I would first have to drive to the local bait shop and pay some weathered fisherman behind the counter seven bucks to untangle my reel and re tie my hook.  I would look at him and try to smile and pretend that I too belonged to the brotherhood of fishermen, but in truth I felt like an incompetent idiot.
 
     "Go, they are catching them now, right outside," Barbara whispered to me again.
 
      "OK,"  I said, not sure why, and still half asleep.  "I will go."  I put on my jeans and sweatshirt, grabbed a rod, put a pair of pliers in my pocket with a rag, and went outside.  Sure enough there were two men in a small boat with a nice sized snook on their line.
 
     I walked to the edge of the canal and hauled out of the water the bucket of shrimp I had bought the day before.  Most of them had survived the night, but they were about as happy as Tom DeLay taking a mug shot.  I searched for a good spot to fish, as if I would know one when I see one.  There were some ripples in the otherwise calm water, with a clear, smooth channel streaming through it.  Would the fish be in the ripples, or in the clear channel, I wondered, as if I was planning my attack with intelligence.  The truth is, I had not the slightest idea.
 
     I settled on a spot, rather randomly, sat down, opened the latch on my bucket and reached for a shrimp, trying to find one that still had a little kick in him.  I pierced his tail with my hook, feeling somewhat badly about that, stood up and made a cast just as the rising sunlight was skimming the water.
 
     After ten minutes with no action, suddenly, to my left, about thirty yards away, a school of fish began furiously leaping and striking the surface, and the water started to boil around them.  YUREKA!  I thought.  I quickly reeled my line in, grabbed my shrimp bucket and ran towards the commotion.  I cast my line right in the middle of it, certain that I would get a strike any minute.  The minutes went by, and it all turned quiet.  They went somewhere, I thought, upstream, or downstream, I hadn't a clue.
 
     Half an hour later I decided to try a different spot, one of my favorites, near some wood pilings and boat docks.  Once I caught a redfish and a snook there.  It was also in that spot where I once cast my line, trying to get under the dock, and instead my hook flew around the wooden deck and wrapped around it three times.  My line would not budge and I stood there, frozen, my rod bent and extended, my hook stuck, and I didn't know what to do and just hoped that no one was watching.  Just as I was about to call 911 on my cell phone, I decided to cut my line and take the rod back to the store and pay seven dollars to have it untangled and a new hook tied on.
 
     On this morning, my hook didn't get stuck anywhere thankfully, but there was no action in the water either.  Then a woman jogger passed me by, and said, pointing behind her, and running in place, that just down the path she saw a whole big school of jumping fish, and seagulls were swooping down and plucking them out of the water.  I thanked her for the hot tip, quickly pulled my line in again, and with my poor little exhausted shrimp dangling and swinging from my rod, I ran to the spot she said.  Sure enough something was going on there, and I threw my line out to the middle of it.  Then, once again, all became quiet.
 
     By this time I noticed someone walking towards me carrying a rod.  My immediate concern shifted from actually catching something, to simply not looking or sounding like someone who had no idea what he was doing.  We shared that neither of us had caught anything so far that morning.  He told me that just around the bend he saw fish jumping furiously but nothing was biting.  I felt less incompetent.  Then I looked at his sad bait, which was a very fake looking rubber shrimp.  Suddenly I felt good with what I had; like a 7th grade boy in the gym shower with the other guys thinking that hey, I was OK after all.   We chatted for a bit, and as I listened to myself I sounded like I knew what I was doing.  We wished each other good luck, and he moved on.
 
     I stayed another fifteen minutes or so, and as my line became entangled, and the fish weren't biting, I brought my line in, unhooked and freed my dizzy shrimp with a blessing and many thanks for his sacrifice, dropped my bucket in the water to keep the miserable shrimp a little less miserable, and went home.
 
     "How many did you get?" Barbara called from the bedroom as I walked in the door.  I told her that I didn't catch any, and told her about the schools of jumping fish.  "Oh, you won't catch those," she said.  "They are vegetarians."
 
     "What?!"
 
     "They are vegetarians.  They won't eat shrimp," she said.
 
     This was news to me.  I never knew that some fish were meat eaters and others vegetarians; I thought that was only dinasours.  She assured me that she was correct, and that if I wanted I could call and ask her father.  Suddenly I wondered why she sent me out at 6:30 on a Saturday morning to chase schools of vegetarian fish with half dead shrimp when they were never going to eat what was on the menu.
 
     I sat on the porch with my rod and pliers, cut the tangled line, rethread the clean line through the rod, re tied the hook, and rested the fixed rod against the wall.  I was pleased with that.  And, I thought, I just saved seven dollars.  I made a mental note that next time I go fishing, maybe I ought to bring along a can of green beans.  I got back into bed.  Just as I started to doze, I thought to myself, maybe I ought to consider taking up boating.
 
H.H. Donald M. Bernstein
 
 
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