I loved it and I loved rigging the baits to make them swim and I enjoyed every day out here and I was able to be out there almost every day.  We would fish inshore and catch a bunch of bass and blues and them steam offshore and catch school tuna and a marlin or two or six and did it day after day from late June until late September and then at the end of it all we would go to Gloucester to catch Giant Tuna fish for about a month.  And boy, did we catch them!  What a wonderful time it was.
The fish at the fingers were special.  I had rigged several swimming baits and had made up a couple of double hooked Bonefish of about three pounds they were about 22 inches long with a hook in the head facing up and a hook in the vent facing down.  They had an egg sinker under the chin and they swam so well that they would throw up a little wake just like a living fish would.  It was magical t be able to rig like that and I worked hard at it and could rig anything any way I could imagine and could make it work and loved doing it.  I enjoyed it thoroughly. The secret was in having everything perfectly balanced and even and no strain on any single place and you did that with dental tape and by making cradles and webs to take up strain and keep everything in perfect alignment.
I remembered everything I had ever read and studied all the books that had anything at all to show and soon found that there were a few basic principles and if you  understood them you could mix it up and push the boundaries and come up with some interesting innovations that would work and after that you could start making decisions on rigging that were based on understanding fish and how to rig to get them to hit and then learning how to rig a big bait so that the gear would stand up to the fight and last for as long as it had to and that some ways of rigging were interesting but impractical for the kind of pressures that came with the fight of a big tough fish like a Giant tuna.
I liked to rig with hard wire and dental tape. I loved hooks and figuring how to rig each one to get the most out of it and how some hooks were just bad and some were good and some didn’t make any sense at all but worked better than anything else and you learned by doing it and seeing the results. It was a great time to be fishing for big fish because we had them to fish for and they would teach you what worked and what didn’t and either you won or you lost and there was no in-between.

************** end of session
next session,

Big game fishing is a precise game and in the days when I was a player there were only two people on a boat that were playing it, the captain and the mate.  The angler’s thought they were and they were in the sense that they did the hard part of fighting the fish but they were for the most part interchangeable and way down deep they knew it even though they were never told.  Even today with all the hoopla of teams and tournaments they  still are and they know it but they will never bring it up as to hear it said would be to painful. That is not to say that some anglers were bad and some were good because that is true some were bad and some good  but a bad angler would not affect the catching all he had to do was not die in the chair and you would get the fish with the boat. IF he was also a nasty person of which there were several then everyone spirit is off and the day would be sour and a week would be hell and there are boats with those types of owner operators and I felt empathy for those who have to acquiesce to those kinds of fragile ego driven anglers.
I was lucky as there were very seldom those types of fools on our boat and the owner, Hike, was a gentleman and a team player all the way.  He was also very good at staying alive in the chair.

I was up in the tower and we were trolling three big baits  Two off riggers and one on a flat line.  They were all double hooked and there were two split mullet and one bonefish.
They were all rigged to swim and were swimming perfectly.  The bonefish was on the 80-pound rig that we used for swordfish and it was on the left rigger. We were fishing Dacron
And the leaders were hard wire 240 lb test, which in those days was pretty standard stuff.  The head hook was a 12/0 round eye and the dropper hook was the same but in those days we did not have chaffing gear (little thimbles) for the loops and so we were  very careful with our wraps and paid close attention to weak points.  Hobie wanted double hook rigs and so that ‘s what we used.  They swam beautifully and when you looked down and back at the three of them from the perch of the tower they looked sweet.
We were riding along and it was a beautiful day sun calm air lots of life everywhere there were shearwaters and petrels all over the place and Russians, lots and lots of Russians and always the strong stench of cabbage floating in the air, that smell was so strange and yet so normal and such a part of it.  We had been trolling for about 45 minutes when I turned around and looked back at the bonefish on the 80-pound rig . It was swimming nicely and skipping out of the wave and diving back in on the front side of the fourth wake throwing up a tail wiggle wake and it looked absolutely  vibrantly  alive when, right there in front of my eyes, in slow motion an enormous, gigantic, huge, blue fin tuna decided to sail completely out of the water for its full length and arc through the air for what seemed like a half an hour and slowly twist from upright to sailing on its side and while doing that open its mouth and bulge out and focus its enormous eye right on the spot the bonefish was swimming blissfully along and kaboom the water exploded like a bomb went off and the fish landed right on top of that bonefish and the rigger snapped and the rod slammed down to a complete bend and I was on the deck from the tower and  clearing rods and getting Hike strapped into the chair and it happened in ½ a second and that is exactly what it felt like happened.  It was glorious and incredible and we did it in those days just because we could.
Hike was good in the chair and he knew what he was doing and he and Hobie had done this before although I had not.  I was green but I had good moves and I was totally in my element and I loved it all of it and I still do even though I don’t do it often anymore but in those day when I was young and strong and a bit wild there was no better place for me to be than in the cockpit of a boat with a giant tuna attached to an angler and a good captain at the helm.
I did not know what to expect and the crew was good and I was a part of it and I loved what I was a part of and there was no fear and just a  sense of excitement.  I have seen in the years since certain boats and captains and anglers that are of a different spirit and have been attached to those energies and they are not pleasant to be around and cause great stress and reflect the peculiarities of the personalities of those who fish for things other than the adventure of it.  I think it may be cheaper to pay a psychiatrist a full time salary for couple or three years that to finance a sport boat and fish it for that length of time and it would perhaps do less damage to other good willed people if some folks would do that.

There is a history of this dynamic and battle of ego’s in big game fishing and the wars in this area started almost form the beginning with Zane Gray and Mike Lerner and S. Kip Farrington and others all battling to be top dog and going through captains and singing praises to the latest and greatest and cursing others and Tommy Gifford said it best when he said there are Anglers and there are Muscle heads and he was talking about these very people. Nothing has changed except perhaps there are more of the muscle heads than there were and perhaps more of the anglers too.  One thing is for sure there are more people  fishing offshore now than when I was out there and I have a feeling it is perhaps more stressful now than it once was and there may be  a different spirit dominating it now.

That first tuna fish was incredible.  It was the very first time I had been attached one and personally witnessed what they could do on the end of a line.  The first thing that I did notice after the fight was complete was the total lack of awareness of time passing.  It was all now.  There was  a beginning, and a middle and an end and it was all right now and  intense and full and immediate and at the same time very calm and slow and precise and serious.  Fighting big fish is serious and it is tough.  I do not want to sit in that chair nor did I ever want to and not out of fear but to me it always seemed like an ordeal to get through but the fishing part I loved.  I can never remember the angler’s names but I do remember the boats and the captains and that is the way it actually is tin the business.  It is not the anglers who catch the fish to the professionals it is the captains and that is true throughout the business in every area of it from trout to blue marlin.
There are fishermen and sports.  Sports sit in the chair.
That first run is a wonder and we were using an 80-pound rig.  If Hike had landed it, it would have perhaps been a record but that was not what we were after.  I do not know what we were after but we were after it and they ere old men to me and I was young
But even so, I had my place and it was mine and I spoke and it was listen to and that was good and it sobered me and made me if anything more potent as a force on that boat.
The fish screamed off like and Hike was lifted up on his toes and I had to grab him by the back of the harness and pull him back down. The fish was a screamer and fast and wild and he was on an 80-pound rig, which was very light tackle.  Hike was in heaven.  He had his little gloves and his towel wrapped around his neck and he was doing it! Fighting a fish and that is what this was all about to him and it was his time.  His intensity was complete and he had experience and determination an fought that fish as hard as any one ever fought a fish and he was good, a human jackhammer  and his legs would move in and out  and he would drop and bend his knees and slump into the fish and then hold and reach up with his gloved two hands and grab line and twist it and pull down then switch and hold the gain with one hand and spin the reel and  get it on the reel and then reach up again and grab, and with the bending of his knees and straightening out his legs in unison with the reach and  his gloved hands would  grab a few more feet of line and
get that on the reel .  He was like a bull, like a dancing bull and he was full of joy and fire and he knew what he was doing and knew how to do it and loved being able to do it and he was doing it now and he was on fire and he never stopped.  If the fish slowed or paused turned he was grabbing and pumping and pulling and grabbing and sweating and drinking water and when the fish was racing and running I was holding his harness and pulling him back down in the seat.  He was relentless and he was smart.   He was in that fishes face every moment and he was after its spirit and he worried it and worried it and he never let it rest or left it alone and he let it know who he was and that he was after it and the fish knew and that knowing was important.  Men who can fight fish that way are different than those who just sit and yank with their muscles Tommy Gifford called them muscle heads and they always fared the worse when they ran into a fish worthy of a fight. Hike was an angler in the sense of fighting fish that old Tommy meant. He was fighting that fish one on one and he was determined to fight it with a fight worthy of the fish.  That is all that an angler can do.  Honor the fish by fighting it the best you can and not just sitting there and crying about how hard it is.  I was fortunate in having Hike show me how it can be done when it is done right.
One of the ways a Giant tuna fish fights is to run straight away from the pull for about 3oo to 4ooyards or 600 to 700 yards and then change directions and turn to the right or left and run just as fast to the left or the right and you don’t know it at all because of the distance between you and the fish because the line is still pealing off straight behind you at a breakneck speed and there may be several hundred yards between you and the fish and the fish is moving at about 35 miles per hour unless he is moving at fifty which they sometimes do and the line is sailing  off the reel straight back and the hydraulics of the water keep it locked right behind the boat and all of a sudden it starts to move so fast that it is hard to follow except for the rooster tail that goes up into the air to the height of 10 to 12 feet and it looks like a single ski water skier taking a turn  and the water is sliced by the line cutting across the surface so fast and then all of a sudden the line jumps down under and the tuna is in front of the boat and the line is going under the boat and the fish is heading to the right and the rod is facing the left and the fish moves to the left or the right of  the bow and it is pretty incredible the fist time you experience it.  We got through several of those and remained attached to the fish and Hike just kept up his relentless hammering on the fish for the grabs of line with his legs pumping and  his hands reaching and I kept his butt in the seat and then things changed.  The fish dove.

A high fish is fast and volatile and you chase them and can trick them and sometimes land them before they know what is happening but a deep fish is different, a tug of war and  it puts a peculiar strain on the angler and the tackle and the tension in the atmosphere is great and a silence comes to the boat and the engines rumble and the exhaust makes a peculiar bulub blub sound and for a few minutes there is a rest and then patience comes into play but so do other wily things.  The radio will be making noise and with Hobie half the world out there was cheering hike on and for the first time the rest of the world came on board except for Hobie who never left it and would just do what was necessary when you could get his attention off the radio.  He was very animated up on the bridge but that mike was always in his hand.
The fish sounded and he kept going down and down and began to run deep and we had to follow he was a hundred feet or more down and was moving fast and we had to keep up and when a fish is doing that it changes the way you have to fight them. There are many ways and I am sure that now a days there are formulas to do it but back them we did not have them as we were the ones who were doing these things sometimes for the first time and sometimes not but we just were doing the best we could with our wits.
Necessity was the mother of invention.
The whole dynamic of the cockpit changed and the end of the rod became the focus of everyone’s attention,  The fish was moving away and we were attached and he moved steadily and strongly and the boat began to follow him in reverse and the sound of  the exhaust became pronounced and rhymical and the line coming off the reel snapped and crackled and squeaked and the fish kept moving deep below and kept his heading and never slowed or changed direction and Hobie yelled down, ”We‘re Going to see if we can tow him up, ease up on the drag I am going to move away from him and see what happens.”
This was a welcome respite as it was tedious and endless and doing something different was a hopeful and soon we were whizzing away from the fish and the line began to rise as we moved further and further from him and then it really did begin to move.  “We are plane-ing him up,” Hobie yelled all excited and sure enough the fish was up and moving and he was panicked and wild and spinning like a kite on a string and it was over.
The fish was gone. Hike was out of the chair and there was no regret or words of disappointment.  The fish was just gone and before anyone said anything we were back fishing again and the baits were out and we were trolling and the riggers were out and I had the broken rig in my hand and showed it to Hike and said the fish was on the back hook and the wire broke.   I still had the front hook. “That 80 lb rig makes it hard, takes a long time to fight a big fish like that , lot of extra time for something to break, Whew! that would have been something if we’d have got him,  I was getting tired.”  Hike was over it and didn’t flinch and that was it.  It was Hobie’s call as captain and he said, “Well we have to use two hooks cause they grab the tail.” He didn’t want to use cable so I doubled the wire.
That was it for that day as far as fish but the next day was coming and the tuna were still in the fingers.  I went up in the tower and stood there enveloped in the silence of the wind and joined the horizon and left the boat far below in another world that was remote and flew home all by myself.

I sat by the river yesterday.

I ate a sandwich.

I cannot alter anything.

I have to wait.

I waited and waited and I did not move.

The geese came swimming up the river.

Ten of them.

They passed by me.

A bit nervous and stayed on the far side of the river.

They passed and the last one stopped.

There were seven young ones and three adults.

 

Raising children in a world full of danger.

Geese raise their children.

When the last one stopped he raised his feet from underneath him and slapped the water with them.

He did it several times and arrested the gaggle and told them to stop.

They did and the order fell apart

They milled and turned and headed back down the river quickly.

He stopped them again and chased a female and grabbed  the tip of her wing with his bill  and calmed her.

He swam up and turned his head many times as he was swimming.

Like a hand turns when it is winding string on its fingers

He was assessing me from every angle

He swam by and came up out of the water onto the bank just to the left of me.

He stood there tall and erect.

One by one the others came up.

He stared at me as they came up.

All ten of them came up and he walked over behind me .

Several of the others did too.

He went back to his original position and  the others started to feed on grass.

The lady of the group bolted into the river and four of her children followed her.

He did not say a word but looked at them strongly.

A hard stare and his neck stiffened.

She returned and all ten were again on the bank.

They began to feed.

Then he led them all further away from the river into a field and they spread out eating grass.

The three adults kept an erect watch over their flock,

.

The father Goose has courage

And has no fear.

He is cautious and wise but not timid.

He goes first and is the rear guard too.

 

They mate for life

I know why.

 

 

Prints and originals will be available for sale.

A lot of people have asked me to do this so I am doing it.

Late this afternoon I took a ride to show a friend Sean Ransom the Blackstone River.

He was impressed by the size of it and the access and the surroundings. He did not expect it to be so nice and to be in a country setting and have the feel of a country setting.

He just came back from fishing the Skeena In British Colombia for Steelhead and still he was impressed with the Blackstone. He did not compare it, he liked it in its own right.

 

We saw some trout, a few rises and there were Caddis hatching up and down the river for at least several miles. The trout were not feeding on the surface and the water was a bit high and slightly off color due to the recent rains.

Still, it was fishable and wadable if you used caution and perhaps a wading staff.

There were folks fishing in the main flows of the river. 

Met a friend and he told us that the fishing was hard today. Lots of caddis but no fish rising.  He had tried going under with various patterns but had no luck.

We headed up towards the Ashton Dam.   We walked a few hundred yards and took a short path into a cleaing that abuted the water.

There were caddis fly’s on the surface, many dead ones.

He asked me about mayflies. I told him I did not know much about the hatches but I had seen some myself from time to time but it is easy enough to find out and I will ask some of the people who know the river well.

 

We walked way downstream from there to a place where there is good access to the water because of a low bank leading into the river. The river is about 120 feet across here and wadable at normal height.

Pretty good flow and a nice surface for seeing a dry fly and rises..

The current is very nice for fishing wets and nymphs too.

Sean has been living in RI for a few years or more and he finally bought a fresh water license.

 

After we came back he stopped in my place and helped me with planning changes for the Web Site to make it user friendly, accessible for people to post pictures and for the boards to be moderated and cleared of spam and the whole site to be renovated and up dated to the state of the art.

Amazing talent… 

Then he asked me to go striper fishing with him for the night.

 

Only in Little Rhody can something like that invitation …

be considered ordinary.

I just wanted to share it as a gesture of friendship not anything else.

It is not an argument I wish to defend.

 

 

 

On trust

This past winter I have been doing a lot of deep reflection and soul searching..

I have confronted many of the ideas that have shaped and formed my life and found then lacking substance and that they are stale. Old ideas good for the time they were formed in but no longer vibrant and relevant. Times change and so does the world we live in.

I grew up in the forties and fifties and learned the values of those times based on the way the world was then.

My family was my whole world my dad and mom my relatives their hopes and dreams and those of all the people I knew then affected me and told me what life was and what to expect.

 

It played out exactly as I was told.

I never questioned those values at some deep level but this past winter changed all that.

I found I did not want the rest of my life to play out as expected.  I did not like what my life like was all that much.

I wanted more a lot more.

So I decided that the only way I could have more in my life was to question every value I had been given to live by and tear them apart and see clearly what was real and valuable and what was mindless belief not based on what is real and lasting.

 

My beliefs I found had isolated me from truly knowing people around me.

Not that people were hard to know but that caution and a fundamental mistrust of people had been inherited from my family of origin.

Wise in its own way but incredibly limiting by default.

Everyone had to prove themselves as trustworthy to be trusted and why?

Fear.

 

A cultural fear of unknown dangers passed down in body language and in the doings of daily life from parents to children to school to work and proven to be true because of a isolating viewpoint in programming. 

A soft mistrust of anyone and everyone unknown.

A soft mistrust, soft like quicksand.

A deadly mistrust that permeated all relationships unless they were proven to be trustworthy.

Vigilance, red flags a slip of the tongue and a perceived hesitation.

Evidence of…

 

The root of all this cautionary insight was a soft mistrust.

Safety first was the only way.

As I looked at this I came to see something fundamental.

If all relationships are based on a soft mistrust then all relationships have to fail because mistrust is at their root.

Who is trustworthy?

Mistrust asks that question.

 

This past winter I asked another question to my self and it was this.

What is the point of trust.

Then I said, “What would my life be like if I based it on trust instead of finding trustworthy people to trust.”

 

I decided that I would find out by changing my belief system from that of soft mistrust to trust alone with no expectations of result.

I am just going to live with a trust that others are the same as me and that they are free to be as they are regardless of my expectations of them just like I free to be me as I am with them.

No proof of trustworthiness needed.

A choice that can be made.

 

I mean no one harm.

No one means me harm.

Allow people to be free to be themselves in my life from now on.

It is a much lighter way then being so intense and vigilant.

 

Is it dangerous?

 

I expect so but I prefer the wonder of trust to the ponderousness of mistrust and the heaviness that it brings to living with our brothers and sisters and our loved ones.

Mistrust destroys what is good it does not protect what is good.

 

I  want everyone in my life to be free of mistrust and I want to be free of all mistrust for the rest of my life.

I am not looking for trustworthy people any more to trust.

 

I never really knew how to mistrust correctly anyway.

It just wreaked havoc with me.

The hell with it.

 

I do not trust mistrust to protect my life any more,

I prefer to take my chances with trust guiding my heart from now on.

 

I want to see what life brings you when you live by trust.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

The Lord is my Sheppard

I shall not want

He leadith me beside still waters

He restorith my soul.

 

Even though I walk through shadows and

the valley of death

He is here

I shall not fear for

He is with me.

 

He leadith me to trout streams

And to rivers fresh and salt.

He dances with me

In the flights of birds

And in the swimming worms.

 

I feel His presence in the clouds and

He is in the wind.

He is in the Catskills and the Blackstone and

The Esopus too.

 

I see and feel him

Everywhere I go

And everywhere I have been

I smell him all around.

 

The Lord is my Sheppard

He restorith my Soul.

And

He doesn’t get in your face…

 

Fishing had lost some of its lightness.

I have always fished and always loved to fish or just be there and I still do.

Today I went to the Blackstone.

Imagine, the Blackstone with trout in it.

Still amazing to a Yankee like me

It’s a friggin miracle.

 

I tied up a pile of flies last fall all glittery and shiny.

I used Christmas tree ornament colors like shiny red bodies and shiny green ones and made them into wet flies, soft hackles and nymphs.

I tied them in lots of sizes and styles.  It was fun and entertaining and interesting too.

I tied them as real flies with carapaces and legs and ribbing.

They look just like the regular patterns except they look like Christmas ornaments to boot.

 

.

Today it was more fun to fish with them because I didn’t care at all if they would work.  They did, every which way I fished them - they worked.

The trout liked them a lot and it was fun to catch them on these flies

Three fish broke me off and three more jumped off and I landed three; one a vey nice sized brown and two rainbows. I got there at 3:30 and left at 6.

 

I enjoyed every moment of it and I had no desire to stay and fish until dark.

That is the first time in my life that I did not feel like fishing until or after dark.

I wanted to get home and write this blog.

 

I think I have rekindled, “The incredible lightness of being,”  that feeling that comes when you find yourself fishing for no reason other then you let it be fun..

 

Yesterday and tomorrow, bookends to today.

 

Today my son is coming to visit me.

We won’t go fishng but we may take a ride to a river or the ocean front.

We may not but this is today not yesterday or tomorrow it is the present and it will be a memory soon.

A yesterday when tomorrow comes tomorrow - and I will not miss today.

 

How I wish I could have had one more day with my own father.

I am getting one more day with my son today and it is sweet and I will not waste it but will savor every moment.

 

I am being blessed and I know it.

So many things become meaningless as time goes by.

What remains is what is important.

 

Love and trust remain and all else disappears.

I am seeing my son today and I am blessed.

 

When I get the chance to spend a day on a river it reminds me of so many times in my life that rivers have carried me through life’s difficulties.

There are times when I have to be near them.

I do not know why it just is.

They are my music my song in my heart.

 

Yesterday the Black Quills were hatching and one of them, a spinner, sat on the tip of my finger and looked at me.

She was big and lovely and she wandered around on the tip of my finger and turned to each of the four directions and knew no fear. For me it was an event and a touch from the universe to my heart. Such beauty to witness such grace.

 

A bevy of little flitting Caddis flies surrounded my eyes and crawled all over my glasses and made me smile with their greeting and their welcoming touch.

 

Trout were rising and every rise gave me joy.

True mindless Joy from a place inside of me that only comes when trout are rising in a river and I am there, again.

It is a mystery to me where these feelings live and come from but they do come and all fishermen feel them too each in our own way and this primal spirit that is in men is in the rivers too.

It is there.

It is always there and greets us every time we come and in our dreams and in our daydreams too.

Trust is a river.

It sets us free to be as we are meant to be.

I like remembering things I care about and the memories that they contain.

Corned beef and cabbage, warm milk and maple syrup with some nutmeg, a soft boiled egg and pea soup.

Soft memories, sweet to my heart.

 

My dad’s old Pflueger Medalist with no paint on it.

His wooden fly tying materials box with inlays on the cover,

his bamboo rod.

American chop suey and my mothers’ clam chowder and going quahoging as a small boy.

Penn Jigmasters and my first 10 ½ foot casting rod that my dad made for me.

Islands in the bay and Nehi orange soda and peanut butter crackers and waking up on the boat with my dad at the helm in the morning after fishing all night and fishing all day and the next night too.

 

Playing first base in pick up games and horseshoe crabs and mummies and striped bass and my mothers French fries cooked in lard.

Mosquito’s on the porch at night and playing twenty questions every night until bedtime before there were tv’s.

My dad’s model A Ford and stories of landlocked salmon from Moose-look-my-gun-go-tick in Maine.

Home movies of me and my sister dancing in the fifties.

Catching scup and summer flounder on Sunday afternoons and fishing with my Aunt Eddie for scup at Nayatt point and eating her fried chicken and lemon meringue pie.

Home fries and beans and ham steak at Magee’s diner and trout fishing in Abbott Run and light Cahill’s so thick that you breathed them in.

Hunky Clark eating a Hexagena mayfly just to see what they tasted like.

Liverwust sandwiches and White Marlin and the smell of diesel and giant tuna.

Black Jitterbugs at night and my mom’s ham sandwiches and Wallum Lake and a black flatfish with orange spots and trout rising as far as the eye could see.

 

All the people I love.