If After Ten Years You Don’t Succeed Maybe It’s Time To Give Up

    I am happy to report that I have broken a family curse, or perhaps it just wore off. You see, as far as we can tell, between me, my father, and his father, we have only caught maybe fifteen fish in our combined lives. My father had long ago decided that it was either a curse or that he is “such an ugly son of a gun that fish fear me and swim away the moment I get near water.” That doesn’t mean we don’t still enjoy going to a dock or out on a boat and trailing our lines in the water; we just don’t expect to catch anything. Well, my father got tired of this trend some time back.
    About eight years ago we went on a family trip to Alaska. While we were there, my father, or perhaps my mother as she’s the kind of person to suggest this type of fun, chartered a trawler. So he and I joined a large group of other tourists for salmon fishing in the waters around Juneau. This was reported to be one of the most bountiful fishing places in the whole country and our captain was saying how many fish his groups would bring in.
    “Commercial fishermen come out here almost every day during the right season,” he told us. “Most of ‘em come back to shore with at least a hundred pounds of fish in their coolers, and that’s on a bad day.”
    My father told me he was likely exaggerating, but he’d done some research which at least partially corroborated the captain’s assertions. We figured that if we couldn’t catch a few fish there then we never would.
    So of course we never caught a fish. In fact, no one did on the entire bay. We were puttering around on that boat for about three hours as I recall, maybe more, with our lines always trailing in the sea. One guy in our group managed to snag a halibut after an hour or so, but it was too small to legally keep. Every few minutes or so the captain turned to a sonar system he had near the helm. We would see an uneven strip of green at the bottom of the screen, the ocean floor, and perhaps occasionally a dot of red or green in the space between that strip and the icon above marking the water’s surface. However the captain was looking for a whole congregation of those little red splotches. After another hour of having no success he decided that we needed some entertainment and grabbed one of the sardines that we were using as bait.
    “Check this out. Watch the sky.” He waved the fish in the air a few times so that its scales flashed in the sun and some rather large birds left the shore and started circling the boat. He tossed it into the air and we watched a bald eagle pelt through the air and snatch the thing in its talons before we could gasp. So we got a bit of a show. Ten sardines later, however, the captain finally said that this was way too bizarre and switched on the radio. He flipped through all of the channels, asking how everyone else was faring with the fishing.
    He’d introduce himself quickly and ask “Is anyone catching anything out there?”
    One man: “Nope. Nothin’ here. You?”
    Another: “I’ve got nothing.”
    Next Guy: “What the hell is going on?”
    Random Guy 4: “Try the northeast part of the bay. My radar say’s there’s something there, but I’m not catching it.”
    He went through every channel and every story was the same, with no one catching more than one or two fish and suggesting that we go to the northeast or southwest or any part of the bay where we weren’t. Even going to those spots we hooked nothing and those who invited us admitted they’d had no luck either. Only when our time was up and we were motoring back at the end of the day did we see any actual evidence of a catch. Even then it was just an old guy in a ten-foot dinghy with a single salmon lashed to the side of his boat. I haven’t honestly tried fishing ever since.
    Thus when a friend from college invited me to go fishing with him I neglected to mention the curse. Of course, once I navigated my car through a few miles of forest trails scarcely wider than my Volvo to get to his place, my conscience got the better of me. I told him about my family history as we loaded up his own dinghy with equipment and got ready to shove off into the enormous kettle pond behind his house.
    Pat MacFee shook his head. “Dude, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been, I catch fish here every day I go out. You’re gonna get something.” Even after I told him about the Alaska incident he insisted we’d get something.
    Lo and behold, two hours later Pat had landed a perch, a pumpkinseed fish, and a big mouth bass. Guess how many I caught. Turns out he’s pretty serious about this whole fishing thing. He knows his business.
    We docked for dinner and he showed me how to make fried chicken. Oh the magic of grease and oil; America’s favorite foods. Still, it was cooked in vegetable oil so that’s redeeming, right? Also it was delicious and all thoughts of health and clear arteries evaporated at the first steaming bite. However, Pat is infamous for his puns and it turns out that his parents are the source of it. I lost my appetite pretty quickly in that maelstrom of wordplay. Well, not really. It was hilarious, but it would feel wrong if I didn’t look down my nose at puns in general and sniff. I’ve got that much dignity left at least!
    After dinner we decided to give fishing another go. Before we left, Pat took me down to the basement and led me to a small collection of goofy hats.
    “For good luck,” he said, pointing to the straw fedora and Blues Brothers sunglasses perched upon his own head. I laughed and took a gardening hat. Why not?
    Ten minutes later I reeled in and landed a perch.
    “What?!” I was giggling like a drunkard and too stunned to do much else other than hold the fish while Pat took photographic evidence. He said I looked like a proud father the way I was cradling the thing.
                                                     
    A few minutes after that I’d caught a pickerel. Boy those buggers are wriggly! They’re long and slender and this one managed to slip my grip to flop on the deck thrice despite both of my clutched hands. Pat snagged another perch of his own and some time after that I got a little guppy of a perch, threw it back, and reeled in an even smaller one on the next cast.
    I hadn’t caught anything in about ten years and even before I’d quit fishing I’d only caught two fish in my whole life. Suddenly I snagged double that in an afternoon?! Woohoo! Who cares that none of them would’ve made a decent hors d’oeuvre?
Though, all fishing aside, it had been too long since I had last been on the water and watched the sunset. It’s easy to ignore stress and obligation when you are slowly spinning on placid water. Fishing is not exactly exciting except for when you have something on the line. However I understand the appeal much better now. It’s the rhythm. Casting out, reeling in, and repeating the cycle is calming. Add in an instance of nature’s glory plus jovial conversation with someone who manages not to get frustrated with my endless fishing blunders and a lovely memory grows. Along with a bit of a debt. When I say “endless blunders,” I mean a dozen bad casts and perhaps fifty yards of tangled line that we had to cut. I owe the guy a drink or a movie or something!
    The problem with sunsets, and part of why we cherish them so, is their brevity and so we headed in, preferring not to motor around blind. I guess it was a day for new experiences because for the last hour of my visit he introduced me to the N64 version of Super Smash Bros and trounced me. Repeatedly. I never thought I’d get beaten up so badly by a puffy pink poof called Kirby and then come back laughing for more.
    As I think I’ve mentioned before, summers are a consistent disappointment for me. However this kind of day makes the holiday worthwhile. It’s a stereotypical, idyllic summer scene and, leery as I am of normalcy, it’s the sort of thing that becomes one of the season’s highlights.
    So there you go Pat! You’re in the blog. Wish granted. Thanks again for a great day!

Song of the Week: I haven’t really been listening to too much music this week, as I’ve been absorbed by audiobook versions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Dresden Files series. However, thanks to my friend Kay, I’ve had this bizarre gem cycling through my head.