Three Fish and a Rod

First, some background and context.

During family vacations to Ocean City, Maryland, we would go fishing in the bay. My grandfather owned a boat called “Little Toot,” after a children’s story with the same name. Weather permitting, we would make daily fishing excursions, usually leaving very early in the morning. The boat had three bench seats and was too small for all of us to go out at once, so we took turns. My grandfather, my grandmother, one of our parents, and one of us kids would go out on the boat while the others went to the beach or to a miniature golf course.

We fished for flounder using live minnows that Grandpa caught in minnow traps baited with crab meat—usually from crabs we caught alongside the catwalk in the small inlet next to the trailer park. We would tie chicken bones to strings, drop them down into the water, and check them periodically for that telltale weight and resistance of a crab clinging to the bone. If you pulled the string up slowly, the crab usually would ride it all the way to the surface, refusing to loosen its hold, and your crabbing partner could swoop in with the net and scoop it up. I can still remember how it felt to pull that string up, ever so slowly so as not to spook the crab.

Back to the fishing. To catch flounders, which are bottom dwellers, you use the “hook, line, and sinker” approach. A live minnow is attached to the hook at the end of the fishing line (I’ll spare you the details). A short ways up from the hook, maybe about 10–12 inches, a leaden pear-shaped weight, called the sinker, is tied to the line. You hold the rod so the end is outside the boat, release the reel lock, and drop the line, led by the sinker’s weight, until you feel the sinker hit the floor of the ocean—or the bay, in this case. This setup gives the minnow enough line to swim around near the bottom, thus attracting the attention of a hungry flounder. As with the crabbing, I’ll never forget how flounder fishing felt: the feel of the sinker hitting bottom upon the initial drop and then again each time I raised the fishing pole upward a few inches and dropped it back down to ensure that the sinker was still on the bottom.

Before going on to the main event in this story, I should mention that this was back in the 1970s, when northern pufferfish, locally known as blowfish, were plentiful in Maryland waters. Note that the blowfish native to the Chesapeake Bay area is not the same as the poisonous pufferfish sometimes prepared (carefully) in Asian cuisine and made famous by a Simpson’s episode. We used to catch and eat blowfish, and honestly I liked them a little better than I liked flounder. Grandpa would net them, carefully reach in to pick them up in his gloved hands, and tickle their bellies so they would blow up like a balloon. Today that seems cruel, but to young kids back then it was entertaining. A red algae bloom in the late 1970s all but killed off the northern pufferfish, but they reportedly have made a resurgence in recent years.

Now, the main story.

One summer morning on the bay, I felt a tug on my fishing line. I began reeling it in, but had a little trouble. Usually that meant that a big fish was on the other end, so either my father or my grandfather took over from me. Peering over the side of the boat, I watched as a light-colored shape gradually came closer to the surface as the fish line was reeled in. It was a blowfish, a small one. Then I noticed two other shapes rising alongside it. Suddenly, we all realized that we were looking at THREE blowfish: one had taken the bait, and two others followed it all the way to the surface. At the time, through my tween-aged eyes, I assumed that the bait-taker was a baby and the two others were its parents, trying to save it. And that made me sad. But in all likelihood, it was probably just a case of groupthink or follow-the-leader within a school.

My grandfather netted two of the three; the other one slipped off the edge of the net and swam off. We were all excited over having caught two fish at the same time, and one without even hooking it. But the fishing luck didn’t stop there. The sinker on my line had become tangled in some other line, probably on the bottom of the bay. This wasn’t uncommon—I remember reeling in lots of discarded line, as well as trash and junk now and then—and Grandpa always pulled in whatever “extras” were snagged and disposed of them later, so as to help cut back on bay pollution.

So he began pulling in the snared line and letting it fall to the inside of the boat. But this was no small piece; it kept coming and coming. After awhile, we realized that we might wind up with a whole reel’s worth of line. But then a tension took hold of the line, and Grandpa said he thought there was a fish on it. He kept pulling it in, fighting against the fish’s opposing force. Sure enough, a fairly big flounder hooked on the line eventually surfaced and soon found itself flopping on the floor of the boat. But there was still fishing line to be pulled in, which was puzzling….. until we saw the tip of a pole. Grandpa grabbed it and pulled it in: it was a brown fishing pole with a silver reel, now housing almost no line, since he had pulled most of it into the boat

This is when he exclaimed, “Three fish and a pole with just one minnow!” He theorized that the person who originally caught the flounder had lost his or her grip on the pole during the reeling-in dance with the fish, and thus the whole thing had gone overboard. My line had become entangled with that pole’s line while we were reeling in the blowfish. The pole was not rusted, suggesting that it had happened not all that long before I caught it. I’m not positive, but I believe that Grandpa was able to clean up that pole and add it to his inventory.

I have imagined, over the years, a fisherman out there somewhere telling a fish tale that is the prequel to mine. For him or her, the cliche about the “big one that got away” actually had, taking all the gear with it. That impressive “missed it by that much” story became my impressive “top catch” tale.

As in so many other life situations, timing, chance, and maybe a slight difference in skills made all the difference in the outcome.

Sunrise, Sunset

Just a few days before publishing my flash-of-green story, I learned through research that the green flash can also be seen at sunset—not just at sunrise, as I had believed up to that point. Upon learning this, I pulled up all my digital photos of sunsets and zoomed in, hoping to see a hint of green. No such luck. But now I know to look for the flash at sunset, too, which I’m more likely to see more of, being a night owl rather than a morning person.

I also learned, from a co-worker who had read the green flash story, about a 1986 French movie called Le rayon vert (“The green ray”). The movie is about a woman pursuing adventure, love, and the fabled green flash; it was released in the U.S. with the simple title of “Summer.” I am definitely going to track down this movie, which I was disappointed was NOT on Netflix.

As promised, below are a few more sunrise and sunset photos. I’ll never tire of seeing either, and I’ll never stop trying to capture their magic through photos.